The Bring Them Home Campaign, which campaigns for the so-called "Colombia Three", has sent the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr Cowen, a copy of a videotape which it claims will discredit prosecution evidence against one of the defendants.
The trial of Mr James Monaghan (56), Mr Martin McCauley (40) and Mr Niall Connolly (36) resumes in Bogota on March 25th. The three Irishmen were arrested in the Colombian capital in August 2001 and charged with training left-wing FARC rebels in bomb-making and using false passports.
At the last sitting of the court on February 7th, a prosecution witness and former FARC member, Mr Edwin Giovanny Rodriguez, claimed to have seen a man similar in appearance to Mr Monaghan giving lectures on bomb-making between February 5th and 25th, 2001, in what was then the FARC-controlled zone of Colombia. The witness repeated these dates a number of times during his evidence.
Now the Bring Them Home Campaign has provided news media with copies of a videotape of Mr Monaghan, dated February 22nd 2001, which purports to show him giving a talk in Belfast at an EU-funded course in public speaking and communications skills for former republican prisoners. The tape was shown on RTÉ last night.
The date "22-2-2001" is visible on the screen as Mr Monaghan is speaking. An independent expert told The Irish Times that it would be "very, very difficult" to alter the date once the original videotape had been made.
In the discussion after Mr Monaghan's speech, another former republican prisoner, identified as Mr Robert Russell, refers to an article by Brian Feeney, of the Irish News, on the Belfast Agreement and its negative implications for unionist ideology, which appeared earlier that week. A copy of the article in question, dated February 21st 2001, was faxed to The Irish Times by the Irish News last night and its content matches the reference made by Mr Russell.
The tape also features Mrs Catherine Murphy, wife of a Sinn Féin member of the Stormont Assembly, Mr Conor Murphy, who was teaching the former prisoners attending the Belfast course. Mrs Murphy said yesterday that she had been a training and educational worker with former prisoners since 1998. She said that Mr Monaghan had given a 10-minute presentation in her presence on "Peace and reconciliation and what it means to me" on February 22nd, 2001.
The spokeswoman for the Bring Them Home Campaign, Ms Caitríona Ruane, said last night that the video was "irrefutable evidence" that Mr Monaghan was in Ireland and that the evidence given by Mr Rodriguez was wrong. The campaign also had work records to show that Mr McCauley was in Ireland on all the dates mentioned and it would further be proved that Mr Connolly was not in Colombia at that time either.
"It is time that the Irish Government intervened in this case. There is a miscarriage of justice occurring," she added. "We are calling on the Irish Government to call for their release and get them sent home to their families. They have been 18 months in jails in Colombia without a shred of evidence being produced."