4/25 Ireland Focus: Who Killed Rosemary Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit The Times April 25 1999 IRELAND: FOCUS While the killers of Rosemary Nelson are still at large, Liam Clarke explains why it is one murder case the RUC must solve Who killed Rosemary? No single murder since Lord Mountbatten was blown up by the IRA in 1979 has so dominated the public conscience. Rosemary Nelson's death, above all a tragedy for her husband and three children, has become a media event, a "celebrity killing" which has spawned almost as many conspiracy theories as that of Diana, Princess of Wales. A powerful campaign has built up, encompassing local and international human rights groups. The American Congress is even taking an interest: last week it passed a special motion calling for a full independent inquiry over Nelson's death, without the involvement of the RUC. A high-powered Rosemary Nelson Campaign, whose launch was attended by Gareth Pierce, the London-based human rights lawyer, paid last week for a full-page advertisement in The Irish Times to urge Bertie Ahern to take a stronger line on the case. "Taoiseach," it pleaded, "if nothing is done to uncover the truth behind murders like this, the mob is effectively being told it can rule." All this despite a police investigation involving 54 officers, run not by the RUC but by a senior British policeman and including officers from counties such as Lancashire and Norfolk. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is supervising, too. Although its officers are excluded from some parts of the inquiry, the RUC's credibility is now firmly on the line. This is a murder it must solve. The irony is that it is precisely this sort of pressure that has led to abuses of human rights and miscarriages of justice in the past. Nobody cares. The civil liberties groups want action, answers and arrests. Many of their minds are already closed. What is their evidence? NELSON arrived back in Lurgan from a family weekend in Donegal on Mother's Day. Overhead were helicopters with British Army and Royal Irish Regiment soldiers. Down the road towards the nationalist Kilwilkie estate, where Nelson was born, were mobile and static police patrols. This was a response to a series of hoax bomb calls designed to lure the RUC into a position where they could be attacked by rioters. At about 8pm the Nelson family car, a silver BMW 3-series, was parked on the drive of their Ashford Grange home. In the next few hours, probably under the cover of darkness, someone placed a magnet bomb under the car. "It took no time at all," said Colin Port, the deputy chief constable of Norfolk, who is directing the murder investigation. Next day, at 12.40pm, Nelson travelled about 100 yards in the car and then braked, triggering an explosion that hurled parts of the vehicle 50 yards and injured her fatally. The Red Hand Defenders, a loyalist group opposed to the peace process, later claimed responsibility. They must have had help. The Defenders' last victim had been Frankie O'Reilly, an RUC officer they kicked to death in 1998. After that the paramilitary group launched a series of ineffective attacks with crude pipe bombs. The device that killed Nelson was similar to one the Ulster Defence Association used to murder Glen Greer, a former member, in 1997. The bomb-maker is probably the same in both cases - a loyalist from west Belfast's Shankill Road. This week Port will meet Paul Nelson, Rosemary's widower, and brief him on security force activity in the area the night before she died. In most societies helicopter over-flights and police patrols would be taken as evidence of the state's vigilance against crime. Not in Northern Ireland. When Port meets Nelson, the security forces and their radio traffic will be scrutinised to establish if any officer or soldier had the opportunity or motive to tip off the solicitor's killers that she was home, and that So far only eight in 10 households that Port's team has visited have co-operated. "Some people say they don't trust the police," he said. Port knows that the possibility of security force collusion is a central part of his investigation. If he does not pursue it with sufficient vigour his own credibility will be on the line. NELSON, 40 when she died, was a solicitor for 12 years and had been taking on terrorist cases for 10. She never forgot her working-class roots and did not press for legal fees if she believed a client could not afford to pay. She helped the Garvaghy Road residents' association in its campaign to prevent Orange marches from passing through the area. Brendan McKenna, the association chairman, was an old school friend. Her work was concentrated in the "murder triangle" of mid-Ulster where the most ruthless loyalist gangs operate along with the North Armagh IRA brigade, one of the most volatile in the province. In the past decade, Nelson gradually became a focus for loyalist bigotry. On July 5, 1997, the RUC decided to force an Orange march down the Garvaghy Road. In the early hours Nelson, who had been seeking a judicial review of the decision, stepped behind police lines to ask officers not to allow the march through. She claimed they jostled her, calling her a "fenian bitch", and left her arm and shoulder bruised. It was the only time she alleged anything close to a personal threat from the police, but to Nelson it fitted a pattern of hostility. Some of her clients said Nelson's life was threatened during interrogation about terrorist offences in Gough barracks, Armagh. The only identified client is Colin Duffy, 31, who was described by police, in one of his numerous court appearances, as the IRA leader. Duffy certainly had reason to resent the RUC, which succeeded in imprisoning him for a total of five years on charges that either he beat or were dropped. He is now awaiting sentence after being convicted of assaulting three police officers in 1997. In September 1996 Duffy's conviction for the murder of John Lyness, a former Ulster Defence Regiment sergeant shot dead by the IRA in 1993, was quashed only after he had spent 3 1/2 years in jail. One prosecution witness was a convicted gunrunner and another was discredited as unreliable by Nelson and her legal team. Nelson drove Duffy home to Lurgan from the Belfast court after he was freed. On the day that Nelson said the policemen jostled her on Garvaghy Road, Duffy was charged with murdering two community police officers. By October the charges were dropped after Nelson and her legal team argued that the main prosecution witness was unreliable. Both Sir Ronnie Flanagan, the chief constable, and Port have stated publicly that Nelson was no more than a lawyer "doing her professional best for her clients". There is no suspicion that she was involved in terrorism. Despite this, rumours were circulated and widely believed in Unionist circles that a disfigurement on Nelson's face was the result of carrying an IRA bomb. In fact it was from an operation to remove a birthmark. Between April and September last year a series of complaints about the threats allegedly made to Duffy were passed to Northern Ireland's Independent Commission for Police Complaints by a body called the Lawyers Alliance for Justice. Both Nelson and Duffy gave interviews and statements. Two other clients, who refused to come forward for interview, also made statements. The investigation was overseen by Geralyn McNally, a respected lawyer and member of Amnesty International. Her relationship with the RUC, which investigated the complaints under her supervision, was fraught. In July 1998 Flanagan responded to her complaints by calling in Commander Niall Mulvihill and a team from the London Metropolitan police to take over the inquiry. McNally concluded in her report, published a week after Nelson's death, that Mulvihill's conduct had been satisfactory. She made a litany of complaints though about the RUC handling of the original investigation. Most of the complaints were rejected by Mulvihill. He concluded that, while the RUC's "various complaint investigations might not have been conducted in an absolutely outstanding fashion, they were adequate". One of McNally's main concerns was that, of 28 officers interviewed, three had prepared written statements with, she believed, the encouragement of an investigating RUC officer. In fact the complaints form given to the officers, outlining the allegations against them, said they could make written or oral statements. McNally also complained that one officer who was interviewed turned up 45 minutes late smelling of drink and referred to Duffy as the "murderer of two policemen". McNally did not make this complaint until three months after the event. If the officer was inebriated it was open to McNally, under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, to halt the interview on the grounds that he was not in a fit state. Most of her other complaints relate to the manner of police officers during interviews, in which they were accused of threatening Nelson. Mulvihill notes that, while some were "awkward characters" and many resented being interviewed, they all acted within their rights. Mulvihill's report is now with the director of public prosecutions. A clue to his thinking on Duffy's allegations is that no officer has been suspended as a result of his recommendations. FOR the RUC to have colluded in the murder of Nelson would have been extremely stupid as well as outstandingly evil. Her death came at a time when the force faced unprecedented scrutiny and when its entire future is being decided by the Patten commission, which is expected to report this summer. The main argument made for RUC involvement is that Nelson was about to reveal some secret so dark that she had to be silenced whatever the cost. A prominent Sinn Fein member says that Nelson had police sources who sometimes fed her information and sympathised with her stance. The Sinn Fein member claims that Nelson was about to reveal detailed evidence of collusion in other murders by senior officers. If this is true, it is unlikely that her secret will die with her. As a meticulous lawyer in frequent contact with international human rights groups, she would almost certainly have made a record of it. Her killers would surely have assumed that any secrets Nelson had would appear, regardless of her murder. A more likely explanation is that the murder was designed by anti-peace process loyalists to polarise opinion and prevent a "sellout" to Sinn Fein by the Ulster Unionist party and the British government. In Portadown and Lurgan there is a history of loyalists circulating collusion allegations to damage relations between the RUC and nationalists, and to make North-South co-operation more difficult. Such allegations, phoned anonymously to journalists, have been made at times when the RUC and the British government have been acting against the Orange Order, as they did in the recent Drumcree standoff. The killing must also have been calculated to cause embarrassment to David Trimble, the constituency MP, who was in Washington at the time meeting American politicians. The biggest factor was probably opportunity. Nelson was an innocent woman, a busy professional, who did not think in military or security terms. That made her an easy target. She parked her car in her drive, not her garage, and did not check under it. Her address was in both the phone book and the electoral register. To her killers, she was a sitting duck. Port must leave no stone unturned and no theory untested if he is to retain the credibility of his inquiry, which is already being questioned by the SDLP as well as by Sinn Fein. He said yesterday: "So far I have found nothing to suggest that police collusion would have been required to carry out this murder. But the collusion aspect of the investigation is continuing and it is a wide-ranging investigation that covers all aspects of security force work." ------- Jay Dooling (jdooling@worldnet.att.net) Irish Aires - 90.1FM KPFT in Houston http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/Irish_Aires/homepage.htm Dooling & Mabe, CPA http://www.doolingmabe-cpa.com/ ------------- ================================================================= 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-04.26.99-09:55:01-32591