Report into four North killings to be released

The British government is due to release today a report on four controversial killings in Northern Ireland.

The report has been compiled by retired Canadian judge Peter Cory who was asked after the 2001 Weston Park talks to examine whether there should be public inquiries into each murder.

The four cases Judge Cory examined were:

:: PAT FINUCANE – The 38-year-old solicitor was hit 14 times in an Ulster Freedom Fighters gun attack in front of his family while he was having an evening meal in February 1989 in their north Belfast home.

However the family, nationalist politicians and human rights campaigners suspected the solicitor, who represented IRA suspects, was a victim of collusion between members of the security forces angered by his work, and loyalists.

In 1992, it emerged loyalist double agent Brian Nelson helped compile a file on Mr Finucane for his killers.

Last year Metropolitan Police Commissioner John Stevens revealed his investigation into collusion found RUC and Army intelligence officers had a part to play in the killings of Mr Finucane and Protestant student, Adam Lambert in 1987.

:: ROBERT HAMILL – In an incident which has been compared to the murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence in London, the 25-year-old Catholic father-of-two died 12 days after being brutally kicked and beaten by a loyalist mob in Portadown town centre in April 1997.

Mr Hamill had been returning from a night out with friends and had walked through the town because they could see RUC officers.

His family and campaigners allege armed RUC officers in a nearby Land Rover failed to intervene but they have denied the charge, claiming they were overwhelmed by the mob and had to retreat.

The case against five people charged with Mr Hamill’s murder collapsed and a sixth was acquitted.

In June 2000 the Belfast coroner John Leckey revealed he had decided not to hold an inquest because he feared for the safety of witnesses.

:: BILLY WRIGHT – The 37-year-old leader of the renegade Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF) was shot dead in a prison van by the Irish National Liberation Army inside the high security Maze Jail as he prepared for a Christmas visit in December 1997.

The LVF leader, whose organisation was formed when the Ulster Volunteer Force expelled his unit for the 1996 murder of Catholic taxi driver Michael McGoldrick during the Drumcree crisis, was jailed in the same wing as INLA prisoners.

His family and unionist politicians were puzzled as to why a watchtower was unmanned and a security camera which could also have spotted his killers was not working.

They have also asked how INLA prisoners were able to discover Mr Wright had a prison visit and how a gun could have been smuggled into the hard-line republican group’s wing.

:: ROSEMARY NELSON – The 40-year-old Lurgan solicitor and mother of three was blown up outside her home in March 1997 when a mercury tilt bomb was placed under her car.

The loyalist splinter group, the Red Hand Defenders claimed responsibility for the attack.

Mrs Nelson was thrust in the public eye during successive Drumcree disputes as the legal representative of nationalist residents on Portadown’s Garvaghy Road and she also appeared before the US House of Representatives.

However her family and some of her clients reported death threats were made against her by members of the RUC in the months leading up to her death.