A television documentary giving fresh evidence of British security force collusion in the murder of Belfast solicitor Mr Pat Finucane prompted fresh calls today for an independent inquiry into the case.
The BBC documentary, aired this evening, quotes a loyalist gunman, Kenneth Barrett, as saying an officer of the north's Special Branch intelligence police had urged loyalist paramilitaries to murder Mr Finucane.
The high-profile Catholic lawyer was gunned down at home in front of his family in 1989.
"Finucane would have been alive today if the peelers (police) hadn't interfered," the BBC reported Barrett as saying in the documentary, which was aired this evening.
He is quoted as saying that police tipped off the gunmen that the coast was clear for them to attack Mr Finucane, because there were no British army or police patrols around his house.
The revelations come a week after it was reported that an inquiry headed by London Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir John Stevens into the same murder found the relationship between security police, British army intelligence officers and loyalist paramilitaries bordered on "institutionalised collusion".
Sinn Féin minister Mr Martin McGuinness today joined calls for an independent inquiry into the murder. "I think the lid has now come off the can of worms and the worms are crawling out," said Mr McGuinness.
He accused the security establishment of malicious leaks against republicans in order to divert attention away from the Finucane affair.
"These are the same people who have been leaking to the media in their attempt to undermine the peace process."
SDLP Policing spokesman Mr Alex Attwood, a member of the Police Board, claimed the allegations further "strengthened...the already compelling argument for an independent, judicial inquiry."
The West Belfast MLA said: "It is clear that Special Branch was not only a force within a force but that in the Finucane and other cases, the rule of law was flaunted with a licence to act without proper accountability, scrutiny or regard to proper police standards."
A spokeswoman for the Northern Ireland Office said the Stevens inquiry was already looking into the Finucane murder.
"We are awaiting the Stevens report," she said, adding that a separate inquiry recently began into six of the most prominent unsolved murders in Northern Ireland, including the Finucane case.
Family and colleagues of Mr Finucane have pressed for more than a decade for an independent inquiry into allegations of security force collusion in the killing.