Britain offered a public apology on Wednesday over its the murky role of its security forces in the 1989 killing of a Belfast lawyer and pledged to publish a report into the extent of police and army involvement in the attack.
The government appointed a leading human rights lawyer to review a mountain of secret evidence into the slaying of Patrick Finucane. The investigator, Desmond da Silva, is supposed to publish his findings by December next year.
“The government is deeply sorry for what happened,” British Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Owen Paterson told lawmakers in London.
Finucane’s family expressed fury that Britain had dismissed their long-held demand for a public investigation into the killing. Two members of a Protestant paramilitary group, the Ulster Defense Association, shot Finucane 14 times as he was eating a meal with his wife and three children in their home.
Finucane’s widow, Geraldine, called the decision “nothing less than an insult.”
She said her family’s lawyers should be permitted to peruse confidential British documents and question witnesses from Northern Ireland’s police, British Army intelligence unit and Britain’s domestic spy agency MI5.
“We are being asked to accept the result of a process from which we are completely excluded ... a shoddy, half-hearted alternative to a proper public inquiry,” said Mrs Finucane, who was herself shot and wounded in the 1989 attack.
However, Paterson said a fact-finding inquiry would be financially wasteful, too slow and unnecessary. He said that senior English police officer, Sir John Stevens, spent more than a decade probing the case. In 2003, Stevens concluded that police and army intelligence agents encouraged the targeting of Finucane and supplied guns to his killers.
Paterson said the bulk of Stevens’ evidence — 9,256 written statements, 10,391 documents exceeding 1 million pages, and 16,194 exhibits of potential evidence — has remained secret, but de Silva would be free to read it all and report its contents.
“The public now need to know the extent and nature of that collusion,” he said.
Paterson made his announcement a day after the Finucanes held a closed-door meeting with British Prime Minister David Cameron and Paterson in London.
De Silva, 71, did not comment. He is currently on a UN panel investigating Israel’s use of force against Gaza-bound ships last year. He has also overseen UN war crimes investigations in Sierra Leone and Liberia.
Paterson said de Silva would re-interview senior former security officials, pore over the Stevens archive and “produce a full public account. Details in papers and statements that have been kept secret for decades will finally be exposed.”
At the time, the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) said it killed Finucane because of his high-profile defense of Irish Republican Army (IRA) clients and because the UDA believed he was an IRA member too. Three of Finuane’s brothers were IRA members, but Stevens said he found no evidence that Patrick Finucane was in the underground organization.
The IRA spent three decades shooting and bombing in the hope of forcing Northern Ireland out of the United Kingdom. Militants within Northern Ireland’s Protestant majority attacked Catholics in a bid to terrorize the Catholic community.
Both paramilitary camps announced ceasefires in the mid-1990s to permit peace talks that produced the Good Friday peace accord of 1998 and, ultimately, a stable Catholic-Protestant government for Northern Ireland. However, the question of British state involvement in the Protestant side’s bloodshed remains a point of bitter contention. Finucane’s case has the highest profile internationally because of his status as a lawyer.
‘CHILD PORNOGRAPHY’: The doll on Shein’s Web site measure about 80cm in height, and it was holding a teddy bear in a photo published by a daily newspaper France’s anti-fraud unit on Saturday said it had reported Asian e-commerce giant Shein (希音) for selling what it described as “sex dolls with a childlike appearance.” The French Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF) said in a statement that the “description and categorization” of the items on Shein’s Web site “make it difficult to doubt the child pornography nature of the content.” Shortly after the statement, Shein announced that the dolls in question had been withdrawn from its platform and that it had launched an internal inquiry. On its Web site, Le Parisien daily published a
China’s Shenzhou-20 crewed spacecraft has delayed its return mission to Earth after the vessel was possibly hit by tiny bits of space debris, the country’s human spaceflight agency said yesterday, an unusual situation that could disrupt the operation of the country’s space station Tiangong. An impact analysis and risk assessment are underway, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said in a statement, without providing a new schedule for the return mission, which was originally set to land in northern China yesterday. The delay highlights the danger to space travel posed by increasing amounts of debris, such as discarded launch vehicles or vessel
RUBBER STAMP? The latest legislative session was the most productive in the number of bills passed, but critics attributed it to a lack of dissenting voices On their last day at work, Hong Kong’s lawmakers — the first batch chosen under Beijing’s mantra of “patriots administering Hong Kong” — posed for group pictures, celebrating a job well done after four years of opposition-free politics. However, despite their smiles, about one-third of the Legislative Council will not seek another term in next month’s election, with the self-described non-establishment figure Tik Chi-yuen (狄志遠) being among those bowing out. “It used to be that [the legislature] had the benefit of free expression... Now it is more uniform. There are multiple voices, but they are not diverse enough,” Tik said, comparing it
RELATIONS: Cultural spats, such as China’s claims over the origins of kimchi, have soured public opinion in South Korea against Beijing over the past few years Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) yesterday met South Korean counterpart Lee Jae-myung, after taking center stage at an Asian summit in the wake of US President Donald Trump’s departure. The talks on the sidelines of the APEC gathering came the final day of Xi’s first trip to South Korea in more than a decade, and a day after his meeting with the Canadian prime minister that was a reset of the nations’ damaged ties. Trump had flown to South Korea for the summit, but promptly jetted home on Thursday after sealing a trade war pause with Xi, with the two
RSS