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Conspiracy In Ireland: North & South

Stormkhan said:
Not forgetting that while the IRA had its roots in a political struggle, many parts of it were criminal gangs operating under the 'flag' of the IRA. This is why any peace process was hard-won - for many members, it was personally highly lucrative.
Click to expand...

That was more true of the various splinters of the INLA.
 
No charges.

investigation began in 2016 under Jon Boutcher, who is now chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland. Hmmm.

Sixteen people - including former IRA members and security force personnel - investigated as part of Operation Kenova, will not face any charges, it has been decided.

Operation Kenova was a £37m inquiry into the Army agent within the IRA known as Stakeknife. He is widely believed to have been west Belfast man Freddie Scappaticci.

The Public Prosecution Service (PPS) decisions include three murders between 1981 and 1993. It said there is "insufficient evidence" to bring charges. A significant part of the evidence is intelligence records which are "not possible to use" to bring prosecutions.

Mr Scappaticci died earlier this year

The victims' families were told of the decisions hours before they were made public on Wednesday.

The Operation Kenova investigation began in 2016 under Jon Boutcher, who is now chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI).

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-67635887
 
no charges for these four either.

Two retired soldiers who handled the Army agent within the IRA known as Stakeknife are not to be prosecuted in connection with a number of kidnappings and murders.

The Public Prosecution Service (PPS) said the evidence was insufficient. IIt also decided two people, who were IRA members at the time of the incidents in the early 1980s, would likewise not face any charges.

Stakeknife is believed to have been Freddie Scappaticci, who died in 2023. The agent's actions have been the subject of a six-year investigation known as Operation Kenova. It began in 2016 under Jon Boutcher, who is now chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland. It examined Stakeknife's activities within the IRA's internal security unit, which was responsible for killing alleged informers, and the role of the Army.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-68218740
 
This case involves the Military Reaction Force

An Army veteran is to be charged with the murder of a man and the attempted murder of six others in Belfast during the Troubles more than 50 years ago.

Three other former soldiers will also face prosecution for attempted murder. he move was announced by the Public Prosecution Service (PPS) after examining evidence submitted following a police investigation.Due to the timing of the decisions, the cases are not affected by the Legacy Act. From later in 2024, the Legacy Act will offer amnesties in Troubles cases.

A veteran referred to as Soldier F will face a charge of murdering Patrick McVeigh, 44, at Finaghy Road North in May 1972. He will also be prosecuted for the attempted murder of four other people in the same incident. Along with individuals referred to Soldiers B, C, and D he is also to be charged with the attempted murder of two people in a separate shooting at Slievegallon Drive in west Belfast, also in May 1972.

The individuals referred to as Soldier F and Soldier C are not the same individuals involved in any previous or on-going prosecution relating to events in Northern Ireland in 1972.

All the shootings involved a undercover Army unit called the Military Reaction Force (MRF), which operated in Belfast in the early 1970s. It was a small, secretive unit and consisted of about 40 soldiers who patrolled west Belfast in unmarked cars. It operated for about 18 months before it was disbanded in 1973.

In 2013, former members of the unit told a BBC Panorama programme that the unit had been involved in the killing of unarmed civilians.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-68238984
 
ramonmercado said:
This case involves the Military Reaction Force

An Army veteran is to be charged with the murder of a man and the attempted murder of six others in Belfast during the Troubles more than 50 years ago.

Three other former soldiers will also face prosecution for attempted murder. he move was announced by the Public Prosecution Service (PPS) after examining evidence submitted following a police investigation.Due to the timing of the decisions, the cases are not affected by the Legacy Act. From later in 2024, the Legacy Act will offer amnesties in Troubles cases.

A veteran referred to as Soldier F will face a charge of murdering Patrick McVeigh, 44, at Finaghy Road North in May 1972. He will also be prosecuted for the attempted murder of four other people in the same incident. Along with individuals referred to Soldiers B, C, and D he is also to be charged with the attempted murder of two people in a separate shooting at Slievegallon Drive in west Belfast, also in May 1972.

The individuals referred to as Soldier F and Soldier C are not the same individuals involved in any previous or on-going prosecution relating to events in Northern Ireland in 1972.

All the shootings involved a undercover Army unit called the Military Reaction Force (MRF), which operated in Belfast in the early 1970s. It was a small, secretive unit and consisted of about 40 soldiers who patrolled west Belfast in unmarked cars. It operated for about 18 months before it was disbanded in 1973.

In 2013, former members of the unit told a BBC Panorama programme that the unit had been involved in the killing of unarmed civilians.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-68238984
Click to expand...

Yet 483 terrorists, between them responsible for hundreds or thousands of murders, walked free from prison because of the Good Friday Agreement:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-65164519

Many of them served only two years’ imprisonment despite being convicted of, for example, the murder of police officers.

maximus otter
 
maximus otter said:
Yet 483 terrorists, between them responsible for hundreds or thousands of murders, walked free from prison because of the Good Friday Agreement:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-65164519

Many of them served only two years’ imprisonment despite being convicted of, for example, the murder of police officers.

maximus otter
Click to expand...

If these ex-soldiers are convicted they 'll also serve a maximum of two years.

These were state agents, they are accused of shooting civilians.
 
Its all tragic lads, we should have been fishing, watching the racing and listening to music together. It was a terrible time now consigned to the past. Hate and bitterness just brings more of the same. As Commandant Tom Barry, ex-British soldier and IRA commander said in 1920 "war is sheer bloody murder".
 
More evidence of State collusion with Loyalists, this tine the LVF.

More than 25 people, including state agents, have been linked by intelligence material to the murder of GAA official Sean Brown, a court has heard.

A family lawyer described the revelations as "shocking".

Mr Brown was abducted in Bellaghy, County Londonderry, and shot near Randalstown, County Antrim, in 1997. He was locking the gates of GAA club Bellaghy Wolfe Tones when he was taken by the Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF).

The inquest into the 61-year-old's death opened in March 2023. It is scheduled to resume in March 2024. Before it resumes, sensitive material relating to the murder must be security-vetted and distributed to the legal parties involved.

The public interest immunity process in the case has been taking place in closed hearings in recent weeks.

Giving an update at the Royal Courts of Justice on Tuesday, counsel for the coroner Joseph Aiken KC, said documentation shown to the inquest "indicates that in excess of 25 individuals were linked through intelligence to the murder of Sean Brown".

He added: "The intelligence material indicates that those individuals are said to have been involved at the material time with loyalist paramilitaries. The intelligence material indicates that at the time of the death of Sean Brown, a number of the individuals linked through intelligence to the murder were agents of the state."

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-68413829
 
ramonmercado said:
no charges for these four either.

Two retired soldiers who handled the Army agent within the IRA known as Stakeknife are not to be prosecuted in connection with a number of kidnappings and murders.

The Public Prosecution Service (PPS) said the evidence was insufficient. IIt also decided two people, who were IRA members at the time of the incidents in the early 1980s, would likewise not face any charges.

Stakeknife is believed to have been Freddie Scappaticci, who died in 2023. The agent's actions have been the subject of a six-year investigation known as Operation Kenova. It began in 2016 under Jon Boutcher, who is now chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland. It examined Stakeknife's activities within the IRA's internal security unit, which was responsible for killing alleged informers, and the role of the Army.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-68218740
Click to expand...

Update on Stakeknife.

An Army spy operating at the heart of the IRA during the Troubles in Northern Ireland probably cost more lives than he saved, a report has found.

Operation Kenova investigated the agent known as Stakeknife. It said speculation he had saved hundreds of lives was wrong and it was more likely it was between high single figures and low double figures. It found the security forces failed to prevent some murders to try to protect their agents in the IRA.

Jon Boutcher, who is now chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), said claims Stakeknife saved hundreds of lives were based on "unreliable and speculative" assessments.

Mr Boutcher said murders that could, and should, have been prevented were allowed to take place with the knowledge of the security forces.

He said those responsible for murder were not brought to justice and were instead allowed free to offend again.

"Morality and legality of agents doing any harm - with the knowledge of the state - is something that we would never, ever allow today," he said.

The investigation found that the use of agents by security forces "undoubtedly saved lives during the Troubles" and "significantly degraded and debilitated the effectiveness of terrorist groups".

"Less frequently", it said, preventable and serious crimes took place and went unsolved and unpunished as security forces tried to protect their agents.

These included:
  • Murders committed by agents - including some cases where one agent murdered another
  • Murders of alleged or suspected agents, including cases where the murder was carried out as a punishment and to deter others from acting as agents - in some cases the victim was not actually an agent *
  • Murders in some of these cases which were known about by the security forces in advance and could have been prevented
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-68510390

* My cousin was murdered by State Agent Sean O'Callaghan as cover for his own role.
 
I've put this in Fortean news because it has a couple of plausible conspiracy angles, namely that broadcast of the documentary was suppressed on the orders of the British government; also the documentary makers are shown to have some links to intelligence services in the USA.

A long and fascinating read.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/extra/xkbwldvmb5/exposed-the-secret-army

And someone asks ... “Did they use it to recruit, not just Martin McGuinness, but other people who were in the film to become agents? That’s going to be one of the great unanswered questions of the Troubles I think.” This idea was posted about on this forum in 2006 - link - and google shows that rumours persist and sporadically resurface.
 
James_H said:
Did they use it to recruit, not just Martin McGuinness, but other people who were in the film to become agents?
Click to expand...

For that to be true then the British Intelligence services would have allowed the Brighton Hotel bombing in 1984 and the mortar bomb attack on the the Cabinet in 1991 to go ahead. These attacks would have been ratified by the IRA Army Council of which Martin was a member and at times Chief of Staff. He was also Chairman of the Army Council during negotiations with the British Government between 1993. the decommissioning of arms in 2005 and the subsequent disbanding of the IRA.
 
I remember reading that McGuinness used to go fly fishing with a senior man from MI6 which I always thought was weird but both the Irish and English love fishing and rightly so.
 
Seeing journa;ists as rhe enemy.

Spying claims involving the police are gathering steam and a scandal is brewing.

A drip-drip of courtroom revelations has widened the pool of “troublemaker” journalists who have allegedly been subjected to covert phone surveillance.

It would appear this was routine practice - when it was ended, or if it even has, is not yet clear.

How did the PSNI's surveillance of journalists emerge?​

In 2018, two journalists, Barry McCaffrey and Trevor Birney, were arrested in an operation led by Durham Constabulary who had been tasked by the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) to investigate how they obtained information for a documentary on the UVF Loughinisland massacre.

The following year, the pair won a court case which found the search warrants used had been “inappropriate”.

The judge said they had acted properly in protecting their sources in a lawful way and the police later paid damages amounting to £875,000.

The journalists then filed a case with the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) which examines complaints regarding covert surveillance and this has widened the story.

Which journalists were being surveilled?​

Material has surfaced through legal disclosure which reveals details of surveillance against Mr McCaffrey, Mr Birney and other journalists. It has emerged they were arrested in the hope of flushing out a source and that Mr McCaffrey was the subject of surveillance on multiple occasions, including in 2013 when his phone was accessed while he pursued allegations of police corruption.

Other documents prompted the BBC to go to the IPT about one of its former journalists, Vincent Kearney, who believes his phone was monitored while he made a programme in 2011 involving the Police Ombudsman’s Office.

This week – in perhaps the biggest development so far – a document came to light which stated eight journalists had their phone records checked as routine. ...

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1rv18v2e87o
 
ramonmercado said:
Spotlight should be interesting on BBC1 NI, Tuesday, 10.40 pm, BBC2, Wednesday, 10 pm.


BBC Spotlight N!
@BBCSpotlightNI

Spotlight returns on Tuesday.
@mandy_mcauley reveals secrets of one of the deadliest loyalist killer gangs as families continue to fight the Government for access to information on who murdered their loved ones.

https://x.com/BBCSpotlightNI/status/1791881859212664984
Click to expand...

Killer Secrets @BBCSpotlightNI. Available @BBCiPlayer from 6AM Tuesday
https://x.com/mandy_mcauley/status/1791786221456302373
 
More interesting claims.

A loyalist killer has claimed the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) believed Billy Wright, the organisation’s leader in Mid Ulster, was a state agent.

Laurence Maguire told BBC NI’s Spotlight programme he had been called to answer questions about Wright for a UVF inquiry in the 1990s.

Maguire said he had begun to have suspicions when Wright stopped him from killing three suspected Irish Republican Army (IRA) members, who were later killed by the republican group - accused of being state agents.

The revelation comes after the government asked the Supreme Court to rule on whether to keep some intelligence on UVF murders a secret. ...

Spotlight: Killer Secrets is available to watch on the BBC iPlayer and on BBC One Northern Ireland at 22.40 on Tuesday 21 May.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cl5548dq2dno
 
Atkinson stood by and watched Robert Hamill being attacked.

Robert Hamill, a 25-year-old Catholic, died after he was beaten by loyalists in Portadown, County Armagh.

Robert Cecil Atkinson, 71, from Brownstown Road in Portadown, appeared before Craigavon Crown Court on Friday. The former reserve constable admitted giving false information to police who were investigating a phone call made from his home on 27 April, the day of the attack.

Mr Hamill died of his injuries on 8 May 1997.

On Friday, the judge said Atkinson had been "a disgrace to [his] uniform".

After the sentencing, Mr Hamill's family called for a date to be set for the release of the findings of a public inquiry into his death. His sister, Diane Hamill, said there has been "a lot of wrong doing and cover up", adding that "hopefully the inquiry will shed more light on that".

She said: “This could have been over decades ago if people had been honest about what they did."

Mr Hamill and a friend were attacked and beaten by loyalists as they walked along Portadown’s Market Street after a night out. Mr Hamill, a father-of-three, suffered serious head injuries and died 11 days after the attack.

Prosecution barrister Toby Hedworth KC previously told the court that when the attack occurred at about 01:45 BST "an RUC land rover was parked nearby" and "one of the crew was Robert Atkinson".

Atkinson was a reserve constable at the time.

He had pleaded guilty in April 2024 to conspiring with Andrea Louise McKee and James Michael Robert McKee, who have previously been convicted, as well as others to do an act which had a tendency to pervert the course of justice.

This related to giving false information in relation to the identity of the person making the phone call.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8995q8x2njo
 
Found it behind a filing cabinet, honestly guv!

The security service MI5 has discovered hundreds of new documents on the agent in the IRA, known as Stakeknife, which were not previously disclosed to a major police investigation.

Operation Kenova has spent years examining the activities of the agent, who was Belfast man Freddie Scappaticci, at a cost of £40m.
It issued an interim report earlier in 2024.

The head of Operation Kenova, Sir Iain Livingstone, said the latest development was "of great concern”.

Mr Scappaticci, who died in 2023, operated as a prized agent for the Army while a member of the IRA’s internal security unit during the 1980s. He has been linked to at least 14 murders.

In 2016, Operation Kenova was set up to investigate and asked MI5, amongst others, for all material it held about him. Part of its investigation looked at the conduct of Stakeknife’s Army handlers and police Special Branch, as well as MI5.

Based on files submitted by Operation Kenova, the Public Prosecution Service (PPS) decided in February there was insufficient evidence to charge anyone.

MI5 first informed Operation Kenova in April that it had uncovered material which was not initially handed over. It is believed that MI5 told investigators it was found while its archive was being digitised. Further discoveries were made in July and searches are ongoing.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg7982lpdyno
 
Kneecap: A somewhat fictionalised version of the founding of the great Hop Hop trio Kneedcap. It's set to the background of the struggle for an Irish Language Act and also takes in dissident paramilitaries, loyalist bands, sectarianism,romance crossing the battle lines and police brutality. Perhaps most importantly it illustrates the gap between those who wanted to keep the Irish Language respectable and those who saw it as a Dodo in a glass cage which needed to be set free. Kneecap's lyrics are certainly disturbing at times but they attracted young people to the language. Drug dealing and the attitude of hypocritical dissidents also help the narrative along. Some great live performances especially the early ones in a GAA club, reminds me of how some of the old lads* reacted to the Punk gigs at rhe Bohemians FC back bar. Some of the strange effects of Ketamine also provide laughs as one character morphs into Gerry Adams, and it;s Gerry himself, he loves the band. See ut for the satire, the laughs and the drama. The lads portray themselves with some good supporting acting from Fionnuala Flaherty, Michael Fassbender, Simone Kirby And Josue Walker. Directed and Written by Rich Peppiatt. In Irish and English.. 8/10.

In cinemas.

*Sigh, I am an old lad now.
 
Unusually a senior officer may be implicated in a collusion case, usually it's just the handlers and the agents/informers they ran.

Scottish spymaster at heart of Ulster dirty war may be in spotlight​

13th September. By Neil Mackay@neilmackayWriter at large

This article appears as part of the Unspun: Scottish Politics newsletter.
At last, 35 years after he was murdered, there’s to be an independent public inquiry into the assassination of the Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane at the hands of a loyalist terrorist death squad.

The inquiry may finally drag Gordon Kerr, the Scottish spy-master behind Ulster’s Dirty War, into the spotlight. For over a quarter of a century, I’ve investigated the activities of the shadowy wing of British military intelligence which Kerr ran. It was called the Force Research Unit (FRU).

In the year 2000, I interviewed an FRU officer who told me his unit had conspired in the murder of multiple civilians in Northern Ireland.
One of the FRU’s top agents was Brian Nelson, a former Scottish Black Watch solider who became the chief intelligence officer for the loyalist terrorist organisation the UDA. It was the UDA which killed Finucane.

Read more:​

The life of spymaster Gordon Kerr

Nelson would go on to be convicted of 20 charges, including five counts of conspiracy to murder and sentenced to 10 years. He died in 2003. Significantly, Kerr gave evidence for Nelson during the trial using the cover name ‘Colonel J’.

Finucane, a prominent human rights lawyer who represented republicans, was killed in 1989 after alleged collusion between FRU officers and loyalist paramilitaries, including Nelson.

Kerr was later promoted to Brigadier, and went on to become the British military attache to Beijing.

Kerr’s unit also ran the British army’s most prized spy inside the IRA: the double-agent known as Stakeknife. I unmasked Freddie Scappaticci as Stakeknife more than 20 years ago. He was right at the heart of the IRA, and leader of the organisation's Internal Security Unit. This was effectively the IRA’s intelligence agency. It was known as ‘the Nutting Squad’ due to its taste for executions with a bullet to the head.

A lengthy police investigation into the crimes of Stakeknife ended with no prosecutions earlier this year. Scappaticci is believed to be responsible for dozens of murders. Many killings were known about by his FRU handlers but no action taken to save lives.

I carried out lengthy interviews with the intelligence officer who ‘handled’ Scappaticci in 2003. He confirmed Stakeknife’s murderous activities. ...

https://www.heraldscotland.com/news...ymaster-heart-ulster-dirty-war-may-spotlight/
 
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