Analysis: Sir John Stevens says he knows who murdered Pat Finucane and is determined his team will follow the evidence wherever it takes them, writes Gerry Moriarty, Northern Editor.
Fourteen years ago this Tuesday, UDA gunmen sledge-hammered their way into the Finucane home in north Belfast in the early hours of the morning and gunned down Catholic solicitor Pat Finucane in front of his wife, Geraldine, and three children.
The word had gone out, allegedly encouraged by certain security elements, "Get Finucane, he is the brains behind the IRA. Forget [Gerry] Adams". The UDA was more than willing to act on this false claim.
The suspicion was, and is, that elements within British army and RUC intelligence were happy that the UDA should target 38-year-old Mr Finucane, and may have played a sinister role in his assassination.
At a revealing press conference yesterday, Sir John Stevens, who is heading the investigation into the Finucane murder and the allied allegations of security force collusion with loyalist paramilitaries, said he knows who killed Pat Finucane and how they killed him.
One of the alleged UDA killers, Ken Barrett, now in the protective custody of the Stevens team somewhere in Britain, was secretly recorded on BBC's Panorama programme last year admitting that he was one of the two gunmen who shot the solicitor.
Barrett said to reporter John Ware that an RUC officer told him: "Pat was . . . an IRA man like, he was dealing with finances and stuff for them . . . and if he was out like, they would have a lot of trouble replacing him . . . He says: 'He'll have to go. He'll have to go'. He said 'He's a thorn in everybody's side'."
The hatred of certain police and army officers of Mr Finucane was based on his having successfully defended IRA suspects in high-profile cases. Some police and British army officers seemed more than willing to confuse the suspects' solicitor with the suspects' alleged offences.
Barrett said that, on the night of the Finucane murder, the police officer who urged him to kill the solicitor passed a message to the UDA murder gang saying that a police road-block near the scene had been taken down and that the route to the house was "all clear".
Sir John Stevens, head of the London Metropolitan Police, yesterday emphatically rejected loyalist and some security claims about the murdered solicitor. "I can categorically say that Patrick Finucane was not connected with any terrorist organisation whatsoever, and those who have alleged such things have told untruths. He was a very effective and efficient solicitor."
Mr Finucane's murder is all part of the very dirty war fought by the police and army intelligence agencies during the conflict. It introduces dark figures like Brian Nelson, a UDA intelligence officer who scouted the Finucane house some days before the murder and who was also working for the British army's highly secret Force Research Unit (FRU).
Nelson was sentenced to 10 years' imprisonment for conspiracy to murder five Catholics. He claims he told his FRU handlers that Mr Finucane was being targeted.
This is the third Stevens inquiry since he first began investigating allegations of security force collusion with loyalist paramilitaries in 1989. As well as the focus on the Finucane killing, Sir John Stevens and his team again have the wider brief of probing security force collusion.
Part of that wider investigation relates to claims that the FRU provided Nelson with files and photographs of alleged republicans, and that this contributed to the deaths of 29 people, most of whom were not involved in any IRA activity.
We learned from Sir John Stevens yesterday that his team is preparing prosecution papers in relation to up to 20 former and serving British army and police officers, which will be presented to the DPP in the North next month. One of those he investigated is Brig Gordon Kerr, former head of the FRU in Northern Ireland, who is now British military attaché in Beijing. He said at Nelson's trial that Nelson had saved many lives by working for the FRU while in the UDA.
There has been a pretty blatant absence of co-operation with Stevens's officers at a number of security levels. Important documentation was destroyed in a suspicious fire at the RUC station in Carrickfergus, from where Stevens runs the Northern element of his investigation.
Sir John revealed yesterday that a substantial quantity of important documentation, some of it going back 14 years, was uncovered by his officers in November. It came from the British army, he confirmed. "We should have had those documents earlier, that's the bottom line."
A Stevens source, when asked how the army could justify not handing over the documents, replied with sardonic disdain, "It's been sold as incompetence."
It's now up to the DPP to decide whether charges should follow against Brig Kerr and others.
Sir John stressed yesterday that while he knew who killed Pat Finucane, that that was based on "intelligence". What he wanted was evidence. Accordingly he appealed directly to UDA members to tell him what they know of Mr Finucane's murder.
At first hearing, that sounds astonishingly naïve, but the Stevens team believes that the loyalist feud provides an opportunity for fresh information to be elicited. Det Chief Supt Dave Cox, who has operational control of the inquiry, said that when former allies fall out among themselves, it could be to the police's advantage.
Sir John will present his interim report in April.
Mr Finucane's widow, Geraldine, said the only solution was an independent judicial inquiry into her husband's murder. Mr Peter Cory, a Canadian judge, is expected to make a decision on such an inquiry later in the year.
Sir John Stevens said he and his team had dedicated much of their policing career to the case and were determined to crack it.
"We will go where the evidence takes us, whatever the rank, whatever the level of the person involved," he said.
