Stone says RUC aided cemetery attack

FRESH claims that the RUC colluded in a triple murder at a Belfast graveyard have sparked further calls for a full public inquiry into the North’s dirty war.

Notorious loyalist Michael Stone, who killed three people in a gun and grenade attack on mourners at Milltown Cemetery, claims he was assisted by an RUC officer and received intelligence documents that could only have come from the security forces.

Stone murdered three people as they gathered at the gravesides of the Gibraltar Three, Danny McCann, Mairead Farrell and Sean Savage. The three were shot dead by the SAS in the British colony in March 1988.

He fired shots and lobbed grenades into the crowd of mourners as a priest gave the graveside oration. The east Belfast killer was caught as he fled the scene and bundled into a car by republicans. He was saved from certain death when the car was stopped by dozens of RUC officers.

He claims to have picked up the arms in Coleraine, Co Derry, before being driven back to Belfast by an RUC officer. “The driver held up his RUC warrant card. If we were stopped at a checkpoint, he would show his pass and we would be waved through,” Stone claims in his soon to be published autobiography.

Stone also insists documents - including aerial photographs and mug shots - supplied to him had to have come from security sources and that there would be RUC/British Army presence around the graveyard.

Calling for a fresh inquiry into security force collusion with loyalists, Sinn Fein said the allegations made by Stone come as no surprise to republicans. Martin McGuinness, Sinn Fein’s chief negotiator, said Stone’s claims had been buried under the welter of publicity about the alleged activities of Stakeknife.

“It comes as no surprise to republicans that Michael Stone is now admitting on that particular operation that the RUC was involved,” a Sinn Fein spokesman said. “We always claimed that. It confirms what we have been saying for many years, claims dismissed by the political and media establishment north and south.”

Stone said he attended the church service for McCann and Savage and was tempted to detonate a grenade in the church and in the direction of McGuinness and Gerry Adams, his two principle targets.

It is widely believed Stone was a loner, outside the mainstream loyalist groups, the UDA and the UVF. But he claims to have received help from a group called Ulster Resistance and that the arms used were from a shipment organised by Brian Nelson, the UDA intelligence officer at the centre of many of the collusion allegations investigated by the Stevens Inquiry.

Stone says: "I had specialist associates. One gave me aerial shots of the cemetery and another gave me street maps which had the exact placing of the Army sangars, or lookout posts, overlooking Milltown. The information was vital. I was never handed a file by a member of the security forces although I do concede the files were very professional, both in presentation and content, especially the aerial photography.

I never questioned where they came from but it was obvious UFF intelligence officers had connections with the security forces.”