The trial of the Colombia Three has descended into near farce, writesDeaglán de Bréadún, Foreign Affairs Correspondent, in Bogota.
The latest twist in the saga of the "Colombia Three" has raised serious doubts about the capacity or even the will of the relevant authorities in Bogota to pursue the case to a successful conclusion.
James Monaghan (56), Martin McCauley (40) and Niall Connolly (36) face charges of training the country's FARC (Spanish initials for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) guerrillas in bomb-making techniques and with using false passports.
The trial proper opened in the Colombian capital on Monday and the proceedings have been marked by a level of disorganisation that at times descended close to the level of farce.
The saga began in early August 2001 when three men were arrested by a military detachment at Bogota's El Dorado airport. It is alleged that two of them, Monaghan and McCauley, were travelling on false British passports while Connolly was travelling as an Irish national, David Bracken.
Normally a dodgy passport would bring you into the custody of the immigration authorities and civilian police and there is no satisfactory explanation so far as to why the men were arrested by the army.
Nor is it clear why they were held incommunicado for up to two days at a barracks in Colombia, without access to a lawyer and with the civil authorities apparently unaware that they were in custody. A further intriguing development was the decision of the military to ask a forensics expert from the US Embassy to come and examine the men's clothing and baggage.
The three accused had come from the demilitarised zone which, at the time, was under the control of the FARC rebels. As part of the Colombian peace process, the government had formally withdrawn from this area, which is about the size of Switzerland. The zone is no longer demilitarised.
The main issue to be teased out in the trial is what the trio were doing there. They claimed they were travelling as tourists and to research the Colombian peace process, just like Queen Noor of Jordan and the former Northern Ireland Secretary, Dr Mo Mowlam.
Their accusers claim this is an "insult" to the intelligence and that the three were actually IRA members from the Provos engineering unit who had come to teach the FARC how to make gas-cylinder "barrack-buster" bombs, so that the mainly rural-based rebels could take their war to the cities. Since the arrests, observers claim to have detected IRA techniques in a number of terrorist attacks by the FARC.
Some public figures in Colombia have already declared the men guilty. The most prominent of these was then-President Pastrana, in an interview with the Washington Post. Supporters of the accused men claim this prejudices their chances of a fair trial and would never be tolerated in other jurisdictions.
The "Colombia Three" have been housed in different prisons, the latest being La Modelo, on the outskirts of Bogota. This is a violent place where gunbattles between prisoners of right and left sympathies break out with deadly results. A reporter on her way to interview a prominent inmate at the prison two years ago was kidnapped and raped. The rationale of housing them in La Modelo is its proximity to the courthouse.
Originally six Irish parliamentarians were meant to travel as part of an observer group at the proceedings. Labour's Mr Joe Costello, a long-time advocate of prisoners' rights, was forbidden to go by his party while Mr John Curran, TD, of Fianna Fáil and Senator Paul Bradford of Fine Gael withdrew under pressure. The remaining trio, the Independent TD, Mr Finian McGrath, Sinn Féin's Mr Sean Crowe and Senator Mary White of Fianna Fáil, flew to Bogota without them and it will be interesting to see what kind of reception they get on their return.
Had they stayed at home they would have missed some of the most unusual court proceedings they are ever likely to see. The trial began with the Judge attempting to call witnesses who had travelled from Ireland, before calling the witnesses for the prosecution. When the defence adamantly refused to go along with this departure from normal procedure, a military intelligence officer in the Colombian Army gave evidence of finding two Spanish-language manuals in the FARC zone which gave instructions on how to make gas-cylinder bombs but he did not establish any direct connection with the three accused. Two former FARC guerrillas were due to give evidence for the prosecution yesterday but neither turned up in court: one said he was too scared, while the other could not be located, despite being part of a Government witness protection programme. The trial was adjourned until February 5th.