An alleged former INLA member who was part of a dramatic Maze prison breakout in 1976 is fighting deportation from Philadelphia to Northern Ireland, where he is facing murder charges dating back to a shooting more than two decades ago.
John Edward McNicholl, who was allegedly an active INLA member at the time, has been charged with the 1976 murder of an RUC constable in South Derry, said Mr James Orloy, McNicholl's attorney. McNicholl is also facing an attempted murder charge related to the same incident, Mr Orloy said.
McNicholl and another man, Seamus O'Kane, were arrested soon after the shooting, but escaped along with seven other republican prisoners when they tunnelled their way out of the Maze prison in May 1976. It was the first successful major breakout in the prison's history.
The case has already sparked anger in Philadelphia's Irish-American community, where one group has rallied to McNicholl's defence. At a meeting last week the city's Federation of Irish Societies released a statement questioning why McNicholl was facing deportation when the US attorney general had suspended deportation proceedings against seven other Irish republicans - known as the "deportees" - in the US.
"There is a hawk circling our community. It is trying to take one of our own. We are not going to stand silently and let it happen," said federation president Mr Tom Conaghan. At a time when prisoners were being released in Ireland, the wheels seemed to be turning in reverse in Philadelphia, Mr Conaghan said.
Mr Orloy said he could offer no reason why his client was facing deportation now. "Maybe this is a process that got started years ago at the request of London or Belfast and is just now making its way through the system," the attorney said.
Although American officials are reluctant to discuss the details of McNicholl's deportation proceedings, Mr Orloy said several RUC officers and British soldiers are named on the witness list to appear at the hearing this morning in Philadelphia. The trial is scheduled for the next two weeks.
A spokesman from the Immigration and Naturalisation Service office in Philadelphia said the agency did not comment on individual cases. But a spokesman for the immigration court administration said McNicholl's deportation proceedings stem from 1995 charges of entering the United States without inspection.
The shooting with which McNicholl is charged took place on July 26th in 1976 when Constable Robert McPherson and another RUC officer were called to examine a vehicle said to contain a bomb in Dungiven, Co Derry. As the RUC men approached, two INLA men opened fire, killing McPherson and wounding his colleague. Constable McPherson was the second member of the security forces to die at the hands of the INLA, which had been formed by dissident members of the Official IRA in December 1974. South Derry was at the time a stronghold of the new organisation, which had claimed its first victim among the security forces near Glenshane Pass on May 24th, 1975, signalling the beginning of a violent campaign. After his escape from the Maze, McNicholl fled to the Republic, where he lived in Donegal for several years before going to the United States.
He settled in Philadelphia, where he worked as a fitter. During the late 1980s his Derry-born wife, who is a naturalised American citizen, returned to Ireland to secure a visa for him. He later joined his wife, but ran into difficulties with the paperwork and returned to the US, his lawyer said.