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Belfast cops let outlaws off hook, probe finds

Raymond McCord, whose 22-year-old Protestant son was killed by a Ulster Volunteer Force unit in 1997, reacts Monday to a report on collusion between Northern Ireland police and the UVF in the 1990s. (Associated Press / The Spokesman-Review)
Shawn Pogatchnik Associated Press
Raymond McCord, whose 22-year-old Protestant son was killed by a Ulster Volunteer Force unit in 1997, reacts Monday to a report on collusion between Northern Ireland police and the UVF in the 1990s. (Associated Press / The Spokesman-Review)

BELFAST, Northern Ireland – An elite antiterrorist unit let Belfast outlaws get away with murder in exchange for information, but its officers will not be charged because they covered their tracks, according to an investigation published Monday into police spying on a Protestant gang.

The findings of Police Ombudsman Nuala O’Loan, the Roman Catholic watchdog for the mostly Protestant police force, sent shock waves through a peace process that depends on building Catholic support for the police.

Her report, the product of a 3½-year probe, found that the police force’s Special Branch intelligence arm covered up at least 10 killings from 1993 to 2000 involving Ulster Volunteer Force members who were being paid for tip-offs. The Special Branch was abolished in 2003 as part of a reform plan that favors the recruitment of Catholics.

The report was published just days before Sinn Fein, the Irish Republican Army-linked party that represents most Catholics, is expected to vote to begin supporting the police.

That long-unthinkable step would follow the IRA’s 2005 decisions to renounce violence, disarm and promote the revival of a Catholic-Protestant administration, the central goal of Northern Ireland’s Good Friday accord of 1998.

Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams said evidence of collusion, far from fueling Catholic hostility to cooperation now, should demonstrate why his party needed to get involved with the police and “stamp out bad policing.”

O’Loan said her investigators interviewed about 100 former and current officers.

She said Special Branch officers suppressed forensic evidence and didn’t follow up leads that pointed to involvement of their Ulster Volunteer Force informers in at least 82 crimes.

“Informants were reportedly ‘baby-sat’ through interviews to help them avoid incriminating themselves, false notes were created and searches of houses to locate UVF arms and the search of a UVF arms dump were blocked for no valid reason,” the report’s summary said.

O’Loan said British state prosecutors will not press charges against any former Special Branch officer because of insufficient evidence of collusion – effectively, because the officers themselves had failed to document their undercover work or had hidden or destroyed key files.