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Date Posted: 19:56:23 03/26/09 Thu GMT
Author: Lynn
Subject: Belfast judge orders 6 alleged IRA disidnts freed, police rearrest top figure (Baltimore Sun)


www.baltimoresun.com/news/world/sns-ap-eu-northern-ireland,0,6895489.story

baltimoresun.com
Belfast judge orders 6 alleged IRA dissidents freed; police immediately rearrest top figure

SHAWN POGATCHNIK

Associated Press Writer

2:16 PM EDT, March 25, 2009

DUBLIN (AP) — Northern Ireland's senior judge ordered the immediate release Wednesday of six suspected IRA dissidents being interrogated over recent killings of soldiers and police, ruling that their 11-day detention was illegal.
Detectives released the suspects but re-arrested the most prominent figure in the group, former Irish Republican Army prisoner Colin Duffy, without explanation. The other five covered their faces as supporters drove them away from a police interrogation center at high speed.
Lord Chief Justice Brian Kerr ruled that all six were being held illegally. While Britain's Terrorism Act permits suspects to be questioned for up to 28 days, subject to judicial permission each week, Kerr said a lower-ranking judge who extended their detention last weekend to 14 days had mishandled the case.
Detectives have spent the past two weeks arresting and interrogating suspected IRA dissidents over this month's killings — the first of British security forces since 1998, the year of Northern Ireland's Good Friday peace accord.
Two off-duty, unarmed British soldiers aged 21 and 23 were gunned down outside an army base as they collected pizzas March 7; two other soldiers and both pizza couriers were wounded. Two days later, a 48-year-old policeman was fatally shot through the back of the head as he sat in his patrol car.
The first two suspects to be taken into police custody — a 17-year-old boy and former Sinn Fein politician Brendan McConville — were arrested March 10 and charged this week with killing the policeman and possessing an assault rifle and ammunition.
The teenager was arraigned Tuesday. His name was not released because he is under 18, the age of adulthood in British criminal courts.
McConville didn't speak during his first court appearance Wednesday. He was ordered held without bail pending his next court appearance April 3. His lawyer said he intended to deny the charges against him.
Police announced Wednesday night that a third suspect, a 21-year-old man, had been arrested and charged with concealing information about the killing of the policeman. His arraignment was set for Thursday.
McConville was a town councilman for Sinn Fein until 1997, when the IRA stopped its 27-year effort to force Northern Ireland out of the United Kingdom.
He opposed Sinn Fein's landmark 2007 moves to forge a power-sharing government with Northern Ireland's British Protestant majority and to begin supporting the police force. But Sinn Fein said Wednesday he had already been expelled from the party for undisclosed reasons.
McConville pleaded guilty last year to possessing ammunition and gun parts, but received a suspended three-year sentence after a judge accepted his explanation that he had found the material in a plastic bag and kept it for novelty's sake.
Lawyers representing Duffy and the five others said they planned to file lawsuits to win Duffy's freedom as well as cash damages against the British government and police.
Kerr ruled that the judge who approved a seven-day extention to the men's custody had failed to consider whether their original arrests were lawful. He said this was required under the European Convention on Human Rights.
Britain's security minister for Northern Ireland, Paul Goggins, said Kerr had ordered the six men freed "on a very narrow procedural ground."
Duffy's family in Lurgan, a bitterly divided town southwest of Belfast, issued a statement accusing the Northern Ireland police of demonstrating "complete disregard" for Kerr's ruling and pursuing a decades-old vendetta against Duffy.
Duffy, 41, was convicted of killing a former soldier in Lurgan in 1993, but was freed on appeal three years later after the key witness against him was identified as a member of an outlawed Protestant gang.
He was back behind bars within a year after police identified him as the gunman who committed the IRA's last two killings before its cease-fire: two Protestant policemen shot point-blank through the backs of their heads while on a Lurgan foot patrol in June 1997.
That case against Duffy collapsed after the prosecution's key witness suffered a nervous breakdown and withdrew her testimony. Two years later, Protestant extremists assassinated Duffy's lawyer, Rosemary Nelson, with a booby-trap bomb attached to the bottom of her car.
___
On the Net:
Text of Lord Chief Justice Kerr's ruling, http://tinyurl.com/dj3nbh

Copyright 2009 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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