Report on Finucane murder delayed again

A MAJOR report into the loyalist paramilitary murder of Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane has been delayed for another six months.

Metropolitan Police Commissioner John Stevens confirmed yesterday he needed to carry out further inquiries into the shooting.

“It would be wrong to deliver the findings of this lengthy and complex investigation prematurely,” he said.

Publication of damning findings on the role of British military intelligence and RUC Special Branch at the time of the murder in February 1989 have already been held up.

The report was due out next month, but it will be next spring before it is ready to be handed over for examination by the Director of Public Prosecutions in Belfast.

Mr Finucane was gunned down in front of his wife and family when UDA gunmen burst into their north Belfast home. Nobody has ever been convicted of the murder.

It is understood Mr Stevens has still to interview Brigadier Gordon Kerr, now the British military attaché in Beijing, and who was head of an undercover Force Research Unit using loyalists as double agents at the time of the killing.

A spokesman for the Commissioner refused to comment on detailed reasons for the second delay.

But in a statement Mr Stevens said further inquiries were being made. “It is important that these matters are pursued, and I’m determined that this report will be absolutely thorough.

“It would be wrong to deliver the findings of this lengthy and complex investigation prematurely,” he said.

Brig Kerr was running a number of senior UDA men as double agents, including William Stobie, who allegedly supplied the gun to kill Mr Finucane.

A murder charge against Stobie was withdrawn after a key witness refused to testify, and he was later shot dead by former associates outside his Belfast home last December.

Two other UDA men also questioned about the murder, Brian Nelson and Ken Barrett, both from Belfast, are living secretly under protective custody in Britain. They have never been charged.

The murdered solicitor’s widow Geraldine said last night she was deeply suspicious.

“It certainly does not inspire any confidence in the hope that they are prepared to bring the truth out into the open. I am confident Sir John Stevens wants to do a thorough job, but I am afraid his report is being manipulated.

“They do not believe the time is right, at the moment, for it to be published because of the fall of the institutions (the suspension of power-sharing executive and Stormont Assembly). Perhaps, this is why they want to delay it. It is very, very suspicious and it raises more questions than answers.”