There is evidence of RUC and British army collusion in 74 murders by loyalists that occurred over a five-year period during the 1970s, an international human rights group has reported.
The international panel examined 25 cases of suspected loyalist paramilitary violence in Northern Ireland between 1972 and 1977, in which 76 people were murdered and found in 24 cases involving 74 killings, there was evidence of RUC and Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR) collusion.
Cases investigated by the group at the request of the Pat Finucane Centre in Derry included the 1974 Dublin-Monaghan bombings, the 1975 murders of members of the Miami Showband, the murders of members of the O'Dowd and Reavey families in 1976, the 1977 murder of RUC officer Sergeant Joe Campbell in Ballycastle, Co Antrim and an attack on the Rock Bar in Keady, Co Armagh in 1976.
The panel found there was "compelling evidence that officers of the British state - in particular RUC officers, UDR soldiers and their agents - were involved in sectarian murders of Catholics".
"There is credible evidence that their activities were known and supported, tacitly and in some cases explicitly, by some of their RUC and UDR superiors and, to some extent, by some British intelligence and army officers," it added.
"Despite this knowledge, appropriate criminal investigations and prosecutions of these murders were not conducted, even in the face of evidence amounting to probably cause for arrest," it said.
The panel published its 109-page report into the killings in Belfast yesterday and will also release the document in Dublin today. Its members are: Prof Douglass Cassel of the Notre Dame Law School in the US; Susie Kemp, an international lawyer based in The Hague; Piers Pigou, who was an investigator for the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and US lawyer and academic Stephen Sawyer. Prof Cassel said as early as 1973 in the case of the UDR and 1975 in the case of the RUC there was evidence that some senior police and British army officers were "aware, tolerant of, or encouraging of" acts of sectarian violence by the army and police in Northern Ireland.
The panel paid particular attention to a sworn affidavit of former RUC sergeant John Weir who, with the late Billy McCaughey, was convicted of the 1977 murder of Catholic shopkeeper William Strathearn in Antrim. Both men were serving RUC officers at the time of the killing. The panel said it primarily based its claims on what it described as "three mutually corroborating and cumulatively compelling sources of evidence" which were: the sworn affidavit of Sgt Weir's alleging security force collusion in numerous murders at that period; detailed ballistics evidence; and "the failure of Northern Ireland authorities properly to investigate the multiple crimes disclosed by the 1978 confessions" of Sgt Weir and McCaughey.
The panel members added that documentary, testimonial and ballistics evidence suggested that loyalist paramilitaries who allegedly colluded with the security forces "gained much of their arms and ammunition, as well as training, information and personnel, from the RUC and UDR".
The panel called on the British government to investigate the allegations using independent investigators and to allow an inquiry team unrestricted access to all relevant information about the killings, including information held by MI5 and MI6. Prof Cassel said the British government should apologise to the families of those who were murdered.
