Monitoring body delivers report on paramilitary activity

The Independent Monitoring Commission has delivered its first assessment of paramilitary ceasefires in Northern Ireland.

The Independent Monitoring Commission has delivered its first assessment of paramilitary ceasefires in Northern Ireland.

The Minister for Justice, Mr McDowell said he will submit the report to Government next Tuesday with a view to its early publication.

The report by the Independent Monitoring Commission (IMC) deals with loyalist and republican incidents, including the alleged IRA abduction of prominent republican dissident Mr Bobby Tohill.

The Tohill kidnapping took place from a Belfast city centre bar in February fuelling concerns over Provisional activity.

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Even though the IRA leadership claimed the abduction was not authorised, Northern Ireland Chief Constable Hugh Orde publicly blamed the IRA.

With unionists demanding sanctions against Sinn Féin over the Tohill case, the IMC decided to hand over its findings a month early following representations from the Irish and British governments.

The dossier was given to the Minister for Justice, Mr McDowell and Northern Ireland Secretary Paul Murphy last night, an IMC statement said this morning.

A spokesman for Mr Murphy said he was "studying the report and arranging to have it printed".

"It will be placed before Parliament next Tuesday, when the Secretary of State will make an oral statement on it in the House of Commons."

The four-man IMC panel, drawn from intelligence, legal and political spheres in Britain, Ireland and the United States, was set up last year and also instructed to examine progress towards normalising the military presence in Northern Ireland and other aspects of the Belfast Agreement.

Sinn Féin's spokesman on policing and justice, Mr Gerry Kelly, said that the IMC was not independent, was outside the terms of the Belfast Agreement and had "no positive role to play.

"The IMC is no more than a smokescreen to be used by the British government to provide cover for any attempt at exclusion in the future.  The issuing of this report is politically motivated and is an attempt to disadvantage Sinn Féin in the imminent talks," he said.

"The British government has refused to implement the recommendation of the Cory Report to hold an inquiry into the killing of Pat Finucane on the basis that it would be prejudicial to the trial of a man charged with his murder.

"In contrast the British government have demanded and received a report from the IMC on an incident involving Bobby Tohill despite the fact that a number of men are facing charges relating to that matter," Mr Kelly said.