Videotape casts doubt over Colombia trial evidence

A VIDEOTAPE made in Belfast has placed serious question-marks over the integrity of evidence given by one of the key prosecution witnesses in the case against the three Irishmen charged with training FARC guerrillas in Colombia.

The film footage has cast serious doubt over some of the evidence of an unnamed defector from the guerrilla movement who told the court in Bogota that he saw a man, now identified as James Monaghan, and two others in the FARC-controlled region between February 5 and 25, 2001.

The defector told the court he collected a "white-haired foreigner" and drove him to a FARC training camp on February 5.

He said there were "two gringos" at the camp for the two-week period in question. He also said in evidence that on the February 25 he drove the white haired man in his fifties to another area where he gave a practical demonstration on the firing of mortars.

The white haired man was James Monaghan, but a video discovered by the Colombia Three Bring Them Home Committee shows the so-called white haired man attending a course for ex-prisoners in Belfast on February 22, 2001.

In the video there is also a reference to an article in the Irish News which proves the date on which the film was taken.

Along with Monaghan, 56, Martin McCauley, 40, and Niall Connolly, 36, are also charged with training the FARC in IRA bomb-making techniques and with using false passports.

Monaghan, a well-known Irish Republican, is understood to have deeply-felt left-wing views and an interest in Third World issues.

Connolly has a background in development work and, despite initial denials by the party, was finally acknowledged to be the Sinn Féin representative in Havana, Cuba.

The men were arrested on August 9, 2001, at Bogotá's El Dorado airport as they were about to board an Air France flight to Paris.

The authorities say they were carrying false passports: Monaghan and McCauley had British ones, Connolly's was Irish.

They had just travelled from the then-demilitarised zone, an area the size of Switzerland which was officially ceded to FARC for a period, as part of the now-moribund Colombian peace process.

The three men claim they were in the FARC zone simply as tourists and to study the peace process.