A damning human rights report alleging British army involvement in several murders, and also implicating the RUC Special Branch, will reinforce nationalist demands for inquiries into past actions of the security forces.
A secret unit of the British army was guilty of "murder by proxy" and of "directing terrorism" in Northern Ireland, a London-based civil liberties organisation has claimed.
The RUC Special Branch is also accused of collusion with loyalism.
The allegations, broadcast on UTV's Insight programme last night, are backed up by a former British soldier who said he was a member of the army's covert Force Research Unit (FRU).
The programme claimed that the FRU was implicated in six murders of Catholics, including that of Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane.
The claims will reinforce the demands of the SDLP and Sinn Fein for independent inquiries into killings such as those of Mr Finucane, Mr Robert Hamill and Ms Rosemary Nelson.
It will also allow these parties to assert that without adequate retrospective powers of inquiry it would be difficult, if not impossible, for nationalism to sign up to the new policing dispensation.
The UTV programme carried interviews with Ms Jane Winter, director of British-Irish Rights Watch, who claimed that the FRU was authorised in its actions.
It also featured an interview with a former FRU soldier, operating under the pseudonym Jack Grantham, supporting the claims.
"I certainly don't believe that FRU was in any sense a maverick organisation, or out of control. I do believe that it was an integral part of British army intelligence, fully integrated into the security services and fully authorised in everything that it did," said Ms Winter.
She was damning of the British government's role in the so-called dirty war.
The programme cited six murders in which the FRU was allegedly implicated. It focused on the 1989 murder of Mr Finucane, and on the murders in 1987 of Mr Francisco Notarantonio and Mr Patrick Hamill in west Belfast. Mr Notarantonio and Mr Hamill were shot with the same gun, according to the report.
The programme alleged that the RUC Special Branch was also implicated in Mr Finucane's murder.
Mr "Grantham" also backs up recent claims that the FRU set up Mr Notarantonio to be murdered by the UDA to protect a high-level IRA informant.
