British army and police officers were deeply involved in the outlawed Northern Irish Protestant group that carried out the 1989 assassination of a top Catholic lawyer, a four-year probe into one of the province's most controversial killings has found.
The leaked conclusions of Sir John Stevens, commander of London's Metropolitan Police, fueled immediate Catholic demands for Britain to authorize an internationally led, public investigation into the slaying of Patrick Finucane.
The Associated Press obtained excerpts from the summary of conclusions Stevens planned to release at a news conference yesterday afternoon.
The 38-year-old lawyer Finucane, whose specialty was representing high-profile Irish Republican Army members, was shot to death in front of his wife and children as they sat down to dinner in their north Belfast home. Although an Ulster Defense Association (UDA) gunman carried out the killing, Catholics have long accused intelligence chiefs of encouraging the hit.
Stevens, who was first assigned in 1989 to probe links between Protestant outlaws and British security personnel in Northern Ireland, was expected to withhold publication of the bulk of his approximately 3,000-page report yesterday and discuss only his overall conclusions. Britain ordered the new collusion investigation in 1999.
A British legal official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said publishing the full report could undermine potential criminal charges against up to 20 current and former members of the Northern Ireland police and British army named in Stevens' report.
But Catholics and human-rights organizations accused authorities of a cover up.
"This explanation beggars belief," said a joint statement from five human-rights organizations led by Amnesty International.
The rights groups suggested those suppressing the full report wanted "to shield some of its contents from public scrutiny."
A leaked excerpt from Stevens' report accuses current police and army officers of concealing or destroying evidence vital to his investigation. It also broadly accepts that rival intelligence-gathering arms of the army and police were both running agents within the UDA unit that targeted Finucane, knew about their involvement -- and sought to protect these sources of information from prosecution.
Stevens' report was expected to confirm that senior members of Special Branch, the police's secretive intelligence-gathering arm, also knew that their agents in UDA ranks were involved in the Finucane murder. Among them were William Stobie, who confessed to supplying the handgun used to kill the lawyer, and Ken Barrett, who confessed to shooting him.
Stobie, who insisted he didn't know Finucane was the target, was charged with the lawyer's murder in 2001 but the charges were dropped late last year after the key witness against him suffered a nervous breakdown.
Stobie was gunned down outside his Belfast home within weeks of his parole. The UDA claimed responsibility.
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