Security forces complicit in killing

Some of the key points raised in Desmond de Silva’s 500-page report:

* Propaganda circulated by the sec-urity service legitimised Mr Finucane as a target. Having wrongly painted him as an IRA figure, Mr de Silva said there was an even greater obligation on the security service to take action on any threat intelligence received.

* Four weeks prior to the murder, then permanent under-secretary at the home office, Douglas Hogg, on the basis of an unsubstantiated police briefing, told Britain’s House of Commons some solicitors in the North were unduly sympathetic to the cause of the IRA. Mr de Silva said in the violent context of 1989, loyalists picked up on his comments and there are grounds to believe those comments unwittingly increased the vulnerability of solicitors such as Mr Finucane.