A senior UDA figure has been covertly filmed admitting involvement in the murder of the Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane. The same loyalist paramilitary failed in an attempt 14 years ago to murder the current Lord Mayor of Belfast, Mr Alex Maskey, he told a BBC Panorama programme which is being broadcast tonight.
The programme claims that an RUC officer personally encouraged the UDA man to murder Mr Finucane in 1989. It also alleges that British military intelligence knew of a plan to murder Mr Maskey but did nothing to protect him.
Both army intelligence and the RUC are accused of widespread collusion with loyalist paramilitaries. Officers from the Stevens inquiry team, which is investigating the collusion allegations, are quoted in support of many of these claims.
The programme claims that Brian Nelson, a British army agent who had infiltrated the UDA in the late 1980s, was provided with files and photographs on alleged republicans by the army's secretive Force Research Unit (FRU), which allegedly contributed to the deaths of 29 people, most of whom were not involved in republican paramilitary activity.
The Stevens report, due to be published in the coming weeks, is expected to claim that the relationship between RUC Special Branch detectives, British army intelligence and loyalist paramilitaries bordered on "institutionalised collusion". Tonight's programme, narrated by the journalist John Ware, supports this allegation.
The UDA member, who is reported to have fled Northern Ireland, is secretly filmed telling Mr Ware that Mr Finucane would still be alive but for the action of police. The programme says that young arrested loyalists were actively encouraged by some of their police interrogators to murder the solicitor. "See, to be honest, Finucane would have been alive today if the peelers (police) hadn't interfered," the loyalist paramilitary tells Mr Ware. He says that at the time solicitors were "off limits" for assassination.
The paramilitary recounts how a police officer allegedly encouraged him to murder Mr Finucane when they met in a car in the company of a UDA commander. The officer told the UDA member: "He'll have to go, he'll have to go . . . He's a thorn in everybody's side." The UDA figure also alleges that the army agent, Nelson, supplied him with a photograph of Mr Finucane less than a week before the murder and drove him to the Finucane home, where the solicitor was murdered.
The UDA man said that on the night of the murder the police officer who urged him to kill Mr Finucane 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".
A Stevens inquiry officer, Det-Sgt Nicholas Benwell, tells Mr Ware that he did not find credible a claim by the FRU and Nelson that they did not know Mr Finucane was going to be shot. The FRU did not tell the truth about the murder, he said.
Det-Sgt Benwell says that there was an agreement between Nelson and his handlers "that the targeting (of republicans) should concentrate on what they described as the 'right' people". To that end, the FRU took control from Nelson of over 1,000 files on alleged republican suspects in the UDA's possession, some of which were old or inaccurate. The FRU reorganised the files and returned to Nelson files of alleged IRA members it claimed were still active.
Det-Sgt Benwell tells how in July 1988 Nelson went on a frantic search around Belfast to recruit a UDA assassination team to murder the current Sinn Féin Lord Mayor of Belfast, Mr Alex Maskey, after he spotted him walking into a restaurant. Nelson, who was sentenced to 10 years' imprisonment in 1992 for conspiracy to murder five Catholics, was acting as an "agent provocateur", said the Stevens officer.
The UDA member allegedly involved in Mr Finucane's murder tells the programme that Nelson contacted him and says that he (the UDA member) entered the restaurant, armed to kill Mr Maskey, but by that stage the Sinn Féin man had left. Nelson told his FRU handler that if Mr Maskey was in the same restaurant the following Sunday, he (Maskey) was "going down". No warning of a second assassination attempt was passed on to the police, however, according to Panorama.
The programme estimates that at least 80 people on Nelson's targeting file were attacked and claims that, of these, 29 were killed. "We do not suggest Nelson had a role in all these attacks," it reports.
