Paramilitaries

Mount Vernon investigation explains HET bias…

Mick Fealty on March 15, 2011, 6:58 pm

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Interesting addendum to Turgon’s post earlier in the day, on the PUP’s call on the HET for it’s bias. Now there is, as Turgon points out (and repeated in the PUP protest banners on this UTV clip), a strange absence of any prosecutions of non dissident Republican paramilitaries. But there’s an explanation as to why the UVF is so well represented in the prosecutions, the investigation of one unit, the one operating in Mount Vernon. And, as pointed out in …

Loyalist terrorist found guilty of sectarian murder

Turgon on February 28, 2011, 9:28 pm

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Sectarian murder victim Alfredo Fusco and his bride on their wedding day Another of the bereaved families from here finally got some degree of justice today. Loyalist terrorist Robert James Clarke was found guilty of the sectarian murder of 53-year-old Alfredo Fusco in his York Road café on 3 February 1973. From the BBC report: Mr Justice McLaughlin said there “was no innocent explanation” for the fact that fingerprints belonging to Clarke were found on the door which Alfredo Fusco …

plus c’est la même chose…

Pete Baker on November 19, 2010, 2:37 pm

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Much of the media focus may be on the economic discussions in Dublin, and the former International Representative for west Belfast may be disappearing over the border… but some things don’t change. The 25-year-old man shot in both legs in west Belfast on Thursday was the third instance of a paramilitary “vigilante” shooting in the city this week. The two other shootings took place in north Belfast. A man in his 20s was shot multiple times by three men wearing balaclavas who …

23rd IMC Report: “skills are more significant than mere numbers”

Pete Baker on May 26, 2010, 12:45 pm

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As the BBC reports, the 23rd Independent Monitoring Commission report has been published online [pdf file]. NI Secretary of State Owen Paterson responds here. Meanwhile RTÉ notes Sinn Féin’s John O’Dowd calling for the IMC to be wound up Mr O’Dowd said the Commission was no part of the architecture of the Good Friday Agreement and had been set up as a unionist comfort blanket. He said it had no role to play in the political process. ‘No doubt the …

Wednesday, June 26, 2002

Mick Fealty on June 26, 2002, 9:25 am

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As claim and counterclaim proliferate over collusion between security forces and loyalist paramilitaries, there is a first few tentative calls for something like a truth commission to bring the conflict to some kind of final rest. Whilst Ulster does its usual summer trick of ritually beating itself up, there may be a thread of hope that no conflict can drag on forever. James Murray Brown speculates that: “There is a hope that this summer could see the quietest Drumcree in …