ON 23RD June this year, a 48 year-old Belfast man, Billy Stobie, was charged with the murder of Pat Finucane. Finucane, who had risen to prominence as a talented criminal defence lawyer, was shot dead by the UFF as he sat down to Sunday dinner with his wife and children on 12th February 1989.
Stobie, who denies the charge, has now publicly claimed that he was an RUC Special Branch informer at the time, and that he told his handlers of a murder being planned and who the killers were likely to be. According to him, the RUC did nothing to prevent Pat Finucane being killed. Furthermore, he says that when he complained to his Special Branch contacts about their inaction, they allegedly replied that they hadn t had time to get things organised and, anyway, he [Finucane] was just an IRA man.
This is just the latest development in the story of Pat Finucane s murder. [See Hot Press 22/7, 23/3]. Less than a month before his death, Douglas Hogg, a junior minister in the British Home Office, made a now-infamous statement, telling the House of Commons that there are in Northern Ireland a number of solicitors who are unduly sympathetic to the cause of the IRA.
Seamus Mallon was among the first to protest, pointing out that following this statement, people s lives are in great danger. Hogg has always refused to say what basis, if any, he had for his comments.
There were also reports of the security forces making threats to Finucane through clients of his who were held in police custody. Initially the lawyer had documented these in full. As time went on, the practice became so frequent that he would just write the word threats in his notes. One former client claims that while being interrogated by the RUC in Castlereagh he was told, fucking Finucane s getting taken out.
The first dramatic development after the murder was the arrest of Brian Nelson in 1990 as a result of the Stevens inquiry. John Stevens, an English police officer, had been asked to investigate claims of collusion between the RUC and loyalist paramilitaries. Nelson was Chief Intelligence Officer of the UDA, which used the UFF name as a flag of convenience when engaged in acts of violence. What his comrades did not know was that Nelson was in the pay of British Intelligence.
Nelson s trial fed suspicions that the British Government had something to hide. He initially stood accused of 34 offences including two counts of murder. But on the trial s opening day these charges were substantially reduced, the counts of murder having been dropped, as had 13 other charges. The official and ill-defined explanation for this decision was that it had been taken after a rigorous examination of the interests of justice. Only one witness was called and Nelson pleaded guilty to all remaining charges. He served only six years in prison and is now thought to be living in England. Many believe that a deal was done to buy his silence.
This view was buttressed by a Panorama documentary broadcast in June 1992. Apparently drawing on a journal Nelson had written while in prison, it suggested that the agent had told his handler about the plan to murder Pat Finucane, and about how he had been asked to provide a photo of the lawyer to the UDA days before the killing. Loyalist sources have also claimed that Nelson pointed out Finucane s house to the people who assassinated him. Again, such claims have added to the growing suspicion that the RUC turned a blind eye to the murder plan.
It has taken a decade for the campaign for Finucane s killing to gather momentum. In April last year, the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights, Para Cumaraswamy published a report of his findings from a visit to Northern Ireland the previous autumn. He called on the British government to set up an independent inquiry into the murder. They refused.
In February of this year, hundreds of lawyers signed a petition supporting Cumaraswamy s view. Among them was Rosemary Nelson, who was one of those who had taken up Finucane s mantle, her clients including the Garvaghy Road Residents Coalition and Lurgan republican Colin Duffy. One month later, she was dead, the victim of a car bomb for which the loyalist splinter group the Red Hand Defenders claimed responsibility.
In March, following a report by British-Irish Rights Watch, Ronnie Flanagan, the current RUC Chief Constable, asked John Stevens to reopen the Finucane case. Again there was controversy. According to The Irish News: In the past the RUC and British government deflected calls for a full inquiry into the case by insisting it had already been probed by Mr. Stevens during his previous investigation of collusion allegations. When Mr Stevens arrived to reopen the Finucane case, however, he said he had never investigated it before.
To cap it all, the weekend after Billy Stobie was charged with Pat Finucane s murder,The Sunday Tribune ran a remarkable story, penned by the newspaper s Northern Editor, Ed Maloney. Maloney had first made contact with the UDA man in 1990, on the basis that what Stobie told him would only be printed with Stobie s permission or if anything happened to him.
From 1987 onwards Billy Stobie had acted as a Special Branch agent within the UDA. Within the paramilitary organisation he was quartermaster general in the Glencairn area of North Belfast.
Stobie s story, as told to Maloney over a period of nine years, has never changed substantively. He says that he was told by the local UDA commander to provide guns for a major operation. The commander insisted on a Browning pistol because it could contain 13 bullets (two gunmen murdered Pat Finucane one delivered one shot from an automatic rifle; the other emptied 13 bullets from a Browning into the lawyer s body). Stobie says he told the Special Branch about this, and claims that although he did not know the identity of the target, the police were well aware of the individuals who comprised the murder teams within the UDA commander s area. If the Special Branch had put these people under surveillance, the murder bid would almost certainly have been foiled.
After the murder Stobie says that he told Special Branch about the method, route and people involved in the attempt to stash the Browning in a safe house. Again, no attempt seems to have been made to intercept those in possession of the murder weapon.
For Stobie events soon took a more frightening turn. He was ordered by Special Branch to hand in his weapons. He did so, and they were kept at an RUC station for two weeks. Soon after they were returned he was asked by the UDA commander who had been in charge of the Finucane murder to supply guns once again. This time they didn t work.
The UDA ordered an internal investigation and Stobie, by now back in possession of the guns, was told to bring them to the commander s house. Shortly before he did so he discovered the firing pins had been filed down, rendering the weapons useless. He believes that no-one else but the security forces could have done this. If the sabotage had been discovered by the UDA commander, Stobie would almost certainly have been killed. In distress, he phoned Special Branch, who mounted a cover operation enabling him to get rid of the guns without attracting too much suspicion from his paramilitary colleagues. Nonetheless, Stobie was increasingly nervous and angry about Special Branch s actions.
After the cover operation he went home to find the RUC searching his house. This did not worry him unduly as he was sure there were no weapons there. To his shock, two guns were found, together with ammunition. Though Stobie has no compunction about admitting many of his illegal activities, he remains adamant that these weapons were planted.
His first trial in 1990 was aborted following an error by a detective appearing as a prosecution witness. According to Stobie this remarkable mistake (the witness let it be known that Stobie had a previous conviction) came immediately after he had told his lawyer to let representatives of the DPP know that he would go public and say that he d warned Special Branch that Finucane s murder was going to happen.
A retrial was scheduled but at the last minute taken out of the list. Finally, The Crown stated that no further evidence would be offered against Stobie, and the DPP recommended that a not guilty verdict be entered.
Now Stobie is once again in police custody. It is thought that this is the result of evidence given to the Stevens inquiry in 1990. Why has it taken so long for him to be charged?
Irrespective of the outcome, the revelation that two people in the pay of the British state had knowledge of the plan to murder Pat Finucane, and informed the security forces of that plan, raises grave questions. Did the state collude in the murder of one of its own citizens? And if so, have other laws been broken in the attempt to hide that collusion? Billy Stobie s lawyer says that there is a murky web of deceit and lies in this murder. Is that web, more than a decade after Pat Finucane was left dead on his kitchen floor, finally beginning to unravel? n