3 Irish Republicans Arrested in Colombia Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit Miami Herald, Aug 22, 2001 THREE IRISH REPUBLICANS ARRESTED IN COLOMBIA Men accused of aiding guerrillas BY JUAN O. TAMAYO BOGOTA, Colombia -- Three suspected members of the Irish Republican Army were charged Tuesday with training leftist Colombian guerrillas, prosecutors said, allegedly for a terror bombing campaign against this nation's cities. The three men, arrested Aug. 11 as they emerged from a region in southern Colombia controlled by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, were also accused of using false passports and face up to 20 years in prison. Niall Connolly, James Monaghan and Martin McCauley say they spent five weeks with the FARC learning about its peace talks with President Andrés Pastrana so that they could apply the lessons to the IRA's negotiations with London. But FARC radio communications that the armed forces here claim to have intercepted indicate the three men trained rebels in the use of Semtex, a powerful military explosive that the IRA has long used in its bombing campaigns. "The three blondies gave training here . . . The stuff about Semtex is very interesting," FARC military chief Jorge Briceño is reported to have said in an Aug. 9 call ordering their lessons be passed to all rebel units. Another rebel called Briceño back later to ask for more details on "the Irishmen," according to the transcripts of the calls, published by the newsweekly Cambio and confirmed by a military official. Although Colombia's decades-old civil war has been largely fought in the countryside, Briceño has vowed in recent speeches to bring the war to the cities to force government concessions at the negotiating table. "We have to shake up the cities to see if the enemies of a political way out understand that they have to open up spaces," Briceño said. The Cuban government said last week that Connolly, 36, who has lived there since 1996, was accredited as a representative of Sinn Fein, the legal political arm of the IRA. But party officials in Ireland denied he held any official job in the party. Connolly, a Dublin-born teacher and sometime carpenter, was reported by the Irish media to be involved in arranging Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams' upcoming visit to Cuba and other Latin American nations. Monaghan, nicknamed "Mortar Monaghan" for his experience with explosives, which earned him an eight-year jail term in 1971, was more recently a member of Sinn Fein's ruling council and worked for a job-creation club in Dublin for former IRA prisoners. McCauley was wounded by the predominantly Protestant Royal Ulster Constabulary in a 1982 raid that uncovered the RUC's "shoot-to-kill" orders. He was given a two-year sentence for weapons possession, and a large cash settlement. Neither London nor Dublin authorities have made any move to extradite the men, saying no charges are pending. ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nytire-08.22.01-10:49:26-551