Report exposes police collusion with paramilitary killers

Devastating evidence that loyalist paramilitary informers were allowed to get away with a series of murders in the North will be revealed today.

Police Ombudsman Nuala O’Loan is to publish damning findings from a three-year inquiry into alleged collusion between police Special Branch handlers and an Ulster Volunteer Force gang based in north Belfast.

She has already briefed relatives of some of those killed by the terrorists about the outcome of a probe which is scathing in its assessment of Royal Ulster Constabulary intelligence operations during a bloody decade in the province.

However, even though files have been sent to the Director of Public Prosecutions following the investigation, codenamed Operation Ballast, it is understood a recommendation has been made that no charges should be brought against any officers.

The report will, however, also focus on how police documents were lost or destroyed.

Senior RUC officers are understood to have been implicated in the biggest ever policing scandal to hit the North, and the British government is braced for an uproar over how a state agency allowed a terrorist unit to kill Catholics and Protestants.

Mrs O’Loan has sent a huge dossier, naming Special Branch and CID officers as well as the UVF agents they ran, to the Northern Secretary Peter Hain and Chief Constable Hugh Orde.

“There were people who knew what was going on and did nothing about it, and others who didn’t but should have known,” a source said.

Mrs O’Loan’s inquiry, which began after ex-RAF man Raymond McCord Junior (aged 22), was beaten to death in November 1997, has been widened to examine a catalogue of killings.

The number involved easily stretches into double figures, according to those who have seen the report.

At the centre of the Ombudsman’s probe is Mark Haddock, a UVF terrorist and Special Branch agent who once ran the paramilitary organisation’s Mount Vernon unit.

Haddock, 37, long suspected of being a paid informer, was jailed for 10 years in November for an horrific hatchet and iron bar attack on a nightclub doorman.

Months earlier he survived an assassination attempt by former associates desperate to silence him.

By the time the gunmen struck, Haddock had been ousted from his position of paramilitary power, but during the 1990s he commanded one of the UVF’s most ruthless gangs.

The Ombudsman’s probe has stretched back to the murder of Catholic taxi driver Sharon McKenna, 27, in January 1993.

However her staff have also compiled high grade intelligence on a series of other victims, including the shooting in 2000 of loyalist Tommy English during a paramilitary feud, and Presbyterian Church Minister David Templeton, who died after being beaten at his home in 1997.

Details on each of the murders linked to Haddock’s gang will be included in the published report, thought to run to 100 pages but which will not identify either him, any other UVF agents or their handlers.

It will also include a series of recommendations on the handling of agents in an attempt to strengthen public confidence.

Raymond McCord Senior, whose original complaint triggered the Ombudsman’s inquiry, described the outcome as another step towards justice for his son.

The north Belfast man, who has defied UVF death threats throughout his campaign, said: “It vindicates what I have said all along.

“The RUC were in collusion with loyalist paramilitaries in killing not only republicans, but unionist people while unionist politicians stayed silent.

“No matter what the UVF try they are not going to beat me. They have lost the propaganda campaign.

“The unionist people see what they really are: not a loyalist organisation, but gangsters, drug dealers and murderers.”

The revelations come at a hugely sensitive time politically, with Sinn Féin on the verge of declaring its support to the police in the North for the first time.

The party’s chief negotiator, Martin McGuinness claimed the report would make a powerful contribution to the policing debate.

“It raises the question about how many more areas were affected, and how many more people were murdered by elements effectively within the RUC and British intelligence,” the Mid Ulster MP said.

“This is the lid coming off the can of worms and Raymond McCord has done our community a great service.”

Mr McGuinness added that it would have major implications for Hugh Orde and the government, and he expressed concern that those involved may escape prosecution.

“The families who have been affected by this will have very great difficulties with this and will be demanding answers, as we in Sinn Féin will be too.

“Especially in light of the situation where you could have an on-the-run (Republican) coming over the border and he would be arrested, yet there would be another group of people who were responsible for the most damnable murders ever seen in north Belfast who are going to get away scot-free.”

Mr Hain acknowledged that the report would make “extremely uncomfortable reading” but said that policing in the North had now changed.

“These things – murder, collusion, cover-up, obstruction of investigations - could not happen today, not least because of the accountability mechanisms that have been put in place over recent years,” he told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme.

He warned that the report could lead to charges being brought against those involved.

“That is a matter for the Public Prosecution Service of Northern Ireland, it is a matter for the Chief Constable and it is a matter for his historic inquiries team,” he said.

“There are all sorts of opportunities for prosecutions to follow. The fact that some retired police officers obstructed the investigation and refused to co-operate with the Police Ombudsman is very serious in itself.

“There will be consequences for those involved and it is a matter for the relevant bodies to take up.”