Former RUC chief refuses to resign over revelations
He came out fighting amid a barrage of criticism over how Special Branch handlers in Belfast paid and shielded a terrorist informer involved in up to 15 killings.
Mr Flanagan, the RUC Chief Constable at the height of the Ulster Volunteer Force unit’s bloody campaign, faced a clamour to explain what he did and did not know.
Nationalist MPs and a UVF victim’s father, appalled by the level of collusion, all called for him to quit his current post as head of Britain’s Inspectorate of Constabulary.
SDLP leader Mark Durkan said he has written to Prime Minister Tony Blair urging him to sack Mr Flanagan if he does not stand down.
But Mr Flanagan insisted he knew nothing about the disclosures made by Police Ombudsman Nuala O’Loan.
Denying any suggestion that he refused to co-operate with the three-year inquiry, he said: “With respect to the specific matters dealt with in the Ombudsman’s report, at no time did I have any knowledge, or evidence, of officers at any level behaving in the ways that have been described.
“I would find such conduct to be abhorrent, and if such behaviour took place my hope would be that it would be the subject of criminal or disciplinary proceedings.”
Raymond McCord — who triggered the Ombudsman’s investigation with his complaint that Special Branch agents beat his son Raymond to death in 1997 — Sinn Féin chief negotiator Martin McGuinness and Mr Durkan were all scathing towards the former chief constable.
The SDLP leader stepped up his attack after Mr Flanagan’s denials by referring to Ms O’Loan’s assessment that the scandal could not have happened without knowledge and support at the highest levels of the RUC.
“I warned Tony Blair that Ronnie Flanagan’s appointment as Inspector of Constabulary would come back to haunt him. Today it has,” the Foyle MP said.
Ms O’Loan’s investigation, Operation Ballast, identified Mark Haddock as the key agent running the UVF gang in north Belfast’s Mount Vernon estate.
He was paid at least £80,000 and protected from prosecution by Special Branch handlers going back to the early 1990s.
Months before he was jailed for 10 years last November for attacking a nightclub doorman, former associates tried to silence him in an assassination attempt.
Haddock was shot six times in May after going to a rendezvous near Doagh, Newtownabbey.
Although he survived the gun attack, it left him with serious injuries.
Sources confirmed that Haddock was taken from Maghaberry Prison near Lisburn, Co Antrim, where he is being held in isolation for his own safety, within the last fortnight.
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