MI5 and army 'hindered Finucane case'
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Your support makes all the difference.MI5, Military Intelligence and Special Branch all withheld information from investigations into the murder of the Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane, according to a BBC Panorama programme broadcast last night.
A former RUC detective-sergeant accused the Special Branch of threatening him, warning him not to investigate and not to speak to the inquiry, which is being led by the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir John Stevens.
Military intelligence is accused of failing to pass on to police information about an impending attack on a Belfast Catholic, Gerard Slane, who was shot dead by loyalists.
The programme followed an earlier Panorama exposé, which suggested police and Military Intelligence had a hand in the 1989 Finucane killing. The Finucane family and other campaigners are demanding a full public inquiry into the case. A Canadian judge, who has been given the prerogative of establishing such an inquiry, will examine the files but is not expected to give an opinion for well over a year.
Panorama said that when Sir John Stevens first investigated the case 12 years ago, MI5 officers signed statements saying they knew virtually nothing about collusion between security elements and loyalist terrorists. In fact, it said, MI5 had direct access to all of the army's secret files. The reporter John Ware said: "MI5 had a crucial piece of intelligence suggesting the police did collude in the murder of Pat Finucane, yet only recently did [it] hand over this vital information to the Stevens inquiry ... It's taken 12 years and three major police enquiries to get this information out of MI5."
The former detective-sergeant Nicholas Benwell, a former member of the Stevens team, said the army only handed over files "under duress".
He also contradicted a statement to the inquiry by Colonel Gordon Kerr, a former head of a Military Intelligence unit. Colonel Kerr said no one in his unit or in Special Branch knew Gerald Slane had been singled out as a target by Brian Nelson, an army agent within a loyalist terrorist group. But Mr Benwell said: "That's not correct. They knew that Nelson had been targeting Slane."
The former RUC Detective-Sergeant Johnston Brown described being warned by a Special Branch officer to stay away from the inquiry. He said he was told: "You walked into the offices of English detectives and you spoke about us, and you think there's no comeback, you think there's no retribution?"
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