Dublin: Special Court To Hear Secret Evidence In Dissident Murder Trial

The trial of three men charged with murdering dissident republican Peter Butterly is "the first case in the history of the state" where a tracking device has been mentioned, a senior garda told the Special Criminal Court today.

Three Dublin men - Edward McGrath (32), of Land Dale Lawns, Springfield, Tallaght, Dean Evans (22), of Grange Park Rise, Raheny, and Sharif Kelly (43) of Pinewood Green Road, Balbriggan - have pleaded not guilty to the murder of dissident republican Peter Butterly (35), who was shot dead in the car park of the Huntsman Inn at Gormanston, Co Meath, on March 6th, 2013.

Mr Evans and Mr McGrath have also pleaded not guilty to firearm offences at the same address and on the same date.

The court has heard that Mr Butterly was “lured” to the car park of the Huntsman Inn by another man not before the court at approximately 2pm on the date  he was kiilled.

A Toyota Corolla vehicle was seen entering the car park and within minutes, shots were discharged at Mr Butterly's vehicle and further shots were discharged when he exited his car and attempted to flee.

Counsel for the Director of Public Prosecutions, Úna Ní Raifeartaigh SC, said Mr Butterly was found by a lone garda collapsed in a corner of the car park and was pronounced dead a short time later.

Ms Ní Raifeartaigh said the DPP will call on evidence from David Cullen (30), with a last address at Brackenwood Ave, Balbriggan, who was “part of the murder plan himself” but turned sate witness earlier this year.

The court has heard that gardaí sought judicial approval to use a tracking device on the Toyota Corolla vehicle which was seen entering the Huntsman Inn shortly before the shooting took place.

Prosecuting Counsel, Alex Owens SC, told the court today that gardaí were seeking the court's protection over how the device was deployed.

Giving evidence, a senior garda said “this was the first case in the history of the state” in which tracking devices had been mentioned.

He said there were two aspects to using such devices under the Criminal Justice Surveillance Act 2009. These were the deployment of a tracking device and the “who, where and when it was deployed”.

The senior garda, whose name and rank cannot be published, said disclosure of the “who, where and when it was deployed” would endanger the lives of not only members of An Garda Síochána but also the Revenue Commissioners and other persons who use tracking devices under the act.

He said particular electronic systems were used by the devices and An Garda Síochána needed to preserve that knowledge for future operations and for the preservation of state security.

“I would suggest we need to preserve that knowledge from the IRA ... and from international terrorists who use the state as a means of furthering their aims.”

The senior garda said every aspect of this case was relayed back to the IRA and any methodology revealed during it would then become knowledge of the IRA.

He said the IRA was a self-styled army with its own intelligence cell and all aspects of this case were being fed back into the organisation. He asked the court to protect garda methodology so it wouldn't become knowledge of the IRA.

Much of the proceedings was taken up with applications to disclose previously redacted material relating to garda surveillance and information provided by Mr Cullen to gardaí.

The non-jury court will rule tomorrow afternoon on the applications to disclose previously redacted material.

Last Thursday the court ruled that the professional names and addresses of eleven garda witnesses from the National Surveillance Unit be provided to the defence but ordered that members of the public be excluded from court during the officers' testimony.

The court also ordered that the officers' entire evidence must not be published so as to protect to protect the unit's methodology.

Outlining the courts' reasons for its ruling, presiding judge Ms Justice Deirdre Murphy, said there was "genuine and valid" concern that future surveillance operations could be affected without the court's protection.

“Ireland is a small country,” Ms Justice Murphy said. “What is known to one can quickly disseminate to many.”

She said “the state should have the capacity to gather intelligence on those who wish to do the state harm.”

The full hearing is expected to begin tomorrow afternoon before Judges Margaret Heneghan and Cormac Dunne with Ms Justice Deirdre Murphy presiding.
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Dublin: Execution Room At Mountjoy Prison Remains Intact

It is the most chilling room you will ever stand in. The Hang Room – or execution room – at Mountjoy Prison in Dublin was last used in 1954, but it remains intact, tucked at the back of  (D) wing of the prison undergoing renovation.

Retired prison officer Seán Reynolds, who curates a small museum on the prison site, unlocked the door to this grim chamber during a visit facilitated by the Irish Prison Service this week.

Even the tool-buzz and chatter of workers renovating adjacent rooms doesn’t detract from the eeriness of this space where 45 men and one woman were hanged between 1901 and 1954. They included the young Kevin Barry and nine other volunteers executed during the War of Independence and buried on the prison grounds until their remains were disinterred in 2001.

The first man hanged in Mountjoy was John Toole, executed on March 7th 1901 for the murder of Lizzie Brennan on Charlemont Street; the last execution was that of Michael Manning on April 20th 1954 for the murder of nurse Catherine Cooper.

Annie Walsh, the only woman hanged here, was executed on August 5th 1925 for the murder of her husband Ned.

Standing above the open trap doors, Reynolds recounts the story the last hangman,Albert Pierrepoint, told of himself: that he had hanged a man “in less time than it took the ash to fall off a cigar I had left half-smoked in my room at Pentonville [prison]”.

Nine seconds to die

Between eight and nine seconds would elapse from the time a prisoner was led through the door from the condemned cell and their drop through the doors into the void of the lower chamber.

The museum itself – not open to the public – is housed in an old cash-and-carry on the prison site. This small room, tended by Reynolds for a few hours each week, contains hundreds of artefacts, many of them donated by family members of retired or dead prison staff.

“I always had an interest in these old bits and pieces you can see around me here. With the help of our chief officer here at the time, Jim Petherbridge, we decided we’d set up a museum. I’ve been running this now here since I retired in 2006,” says Reynolds.

At the back of the room, two huge wooden panels dating from 1858 and from the old Protestant church in the prison, display the Ten Commandments.

Not an inch of wall or floor is free of pictures, artefacts or prison memorabilia. Most are connected to Mountjoy’s 164-year-old history but some are from other prisons in Ireland and elsewhere.

Cabinets display implements of torture alongside the most mundane of items once used by prisoners and prison officers. Old-school cigarette and tobacco packs lie beside whistles on chains, a cat-o-nine-tails and birch rods once used for delivering lashes. Tailors’ dummies model uniforms worn by prison officers and prisoners – many made from tweed woven on one of the 24 looms once housed in the prison’s workshops.

More at: Link:

www.irishtimes.com/culture/heritage/the-chilling-legacy-of-50-years-of-hangings-at-mountjoy-remain-in-atmosphere-of-intact-room-1.1919635 

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Dublin: Irish & British Agent Provatures Are Suspected Of Directing Dissident Republican's Actions

Previous Article: WHEN Brendan Smith takes up his new role as part-time justice minister next week one of the first letters he will receive will be from Labour TD Michel D Higgins demanding a statement on the government’s level of knowledge of rogue British undercover policeman Mark Kennedy’s activities in Ireland.

*The use of dead children’s identities to create aliases for undercover police officers was ‘common practice’, a senior officer has admitted.

But none of the families of the children had been contacted by police, Chief Constable Mick Creedon said.

He is investigating undercover policing, including the use of dead children’s names by Scotland Yard’s Special Demonstration Squad. (Follow Link).

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2272978/police-spies-stole-identities-80-dead-babies-birth-certificates-used-fake-identities.html 

Earlier this year it was claimed up to 80 identities were stolen over a  30-year period, without families knowing.

Officers used birth certificates from real people to create fake passports so that their aliases appeared genuine.

In one case, an officer infiltrating an anti-capitalist group took on the name John Barker, using the birth certificate of Philip John Barker, who died of leukaemia aged eight in 1968.

Sergeant John Dines used the identity for five years starting in 1987.

In February, Philip’s 81-year-old aunt Beryl Ramsell, said she thought it was a ‘sick joke’.

In a letter to MPs published yesterday, Mr Creedon, who is leading Operation Herne into undercover policing, said he was unable to say how many identities had been stolen.

His team of 23 officers and ten police staff has 50,000 documents yet to process.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=79Q5odNCQKU 

The Kennedy case has convulsed the British media and police since he was publicly uncovered earlier this month as a deep-cover agent who had operated within the environmental movement for seven years. However despite numerous accounts of his participation, and allegations of him taking a leading “agent provocateur” role in Irish protests,

the Government has refused to comment or even acknowledge the issue, of what British police minister Nick Herbert has described as a covert operation which went “very wrong”.

The Government’s claims of “no knowledge” are even more unusual due to the fact that for the seven years from 2003 that PC Mark Kennedy lived his double life as a long haired environmental radical, his two children and his now estranged wife lived in her home village near Kanturk and were frequently visited by the off-duty Metropolitan police officer. It is reported that in the local pub Mr Kennedy was well known as the “uncover policeman”.

Using a fake identity as a rock-climbing enthusiast Mark Stone, the undercover officer took part in protests in Dublin, Shannon airport and at the site of the controversial Shell Corrib pipeline.

Since the Irish Examiner first contacted the Department of Justice about PC Kennedy’s activities last October — when his true identity was uncovered by English environmental activists — officials have maintained that they “have no information on the allegations”. However, last week, Mr Kennedy, who is believed to be hiding in the US, gave an interview to a British paper in which he stated that he would travel abroad with fellow activists, and feed information back to his superiors to share with other nations.

“Activism has no borders,” he said.

“I would never go abroad without authority from my superiors and the local police.”

He added: “My superiors knew where I was at all times — my BlackBerry was fitted with a tracking device — and they sanctioned every move I made. I didn’t sneeze without them knowing about it.”

He said he was informed that some of the information he handed on in his daily communications with his handlers was directly relayed to then prime minister Tony Blair.

Several activists have attested to Mr Kennedy encouraging and taking part in illegal activity during Irish protests.

Activists have confirmed that at the May 2004 EU summit protests then PC Kennedy took a lead role breaking into a building on Dublin’s north side to be used as a base for visiting British anarchists.

He also brought a van from Britain containing crash helmets and offered to purchase broom handles to be used in combating gardaí.

“At the protest he was to the fore wearing a balaclava and violently attacking gardaí,” said one activist.

During a March 2006 visit to Corrib he met leading anti-shell campaigners and encouraged them to be “more direct” in their protests.

An activist who housed PC Kennedy during one of his visits to Ireland said: “He was always very supportive of ‘direct action’ protest. It’s disturbing that he would seem to have been acting as a ‘agent provocateur’ attempting to get people into trouble, the key question is who was he working for while in Ireland?”

Mr Kennedy who, was know as “flash” for his access to cash, was so trusted by Irish activists that his portable internet connection in his van was used by campaigners to upload photographs to the indymedia activist news site during anti-George Bush protests at Shannon in June 2004.

In Britain, investigations into the officer — whose operation cost more than €350,000 per year — are now being carried out by the Independent Police Complaints Commission with Nottinghamshire Police conducting an internal review.

In Germany there have been calls for a state inquiry into PC Kennedy’s activities there. Inquires are also being made whether the police officer broke the law by initiating sexual relationships with activists.

While his activities have led to the unmasking of two more British undercover officers inside the largely peaceful environmental movement and resulted in serious questions over the future of the covert National Public Order Intelligence Unit. Mr Kennedy is looking to turn the tale to his benefit having reportedly called on the services of PR guru Max Clifford as he prepares to sell the rights to his story.

Mr Higgins, the Labour foreign affairs spokesman believes the Kennedy case raises major issues for the Irish government.

“Kennedy’s activities are of grave concern and a reminisce of allegations of similar operations in the 1970s and 1980s,” Mr Higgins said.

However Historian Brian Hanley, who has written on the subversive intelligence world, said: “The Irish State has a very poor record in dealing with British subversive activity. In the early 1970s there was the infamous case of the Littlejohn brothers who instated armed robberies and fire bombed garda stations in the republic and later turned out to be working for British intelligence. In 1972, a senior garda in the forces’s intelligence unit was found to be passing on information to MI6. After three months detention, the officer and an MI6 agent were released and left for Britain.”

*The controversy over a police surveillance network embedded in the environmental protest movement has deepened dramatically after the Guardian identified a second undercover officer who spent years living a double life as an activist.

The woman's name has been known to a group of six activists since Mark Kennedy – the police infiltrator identified by the Guardian on Monday as having spent seven years inside the movement – claimed she was also a police officer when confronted by them about his own identity last October.

Senior police chiefs said they were concerned for the safety of the second spy, and a major operation involving several UK forces is now under way to identify other operatives whose safety may have been compromised by Kennedy.

The second spy spent four years living as an environmental activist in Leeds, gaining the trust of dozens of activists and playing a central role in planning a demonstration to shut down Drax power station in North Yorkshire.

Her deployment ended in 2008, when she told activist friends she was leaving town for personal reasons. The Guardian has established the identity of the officer, who is from a force in the south-east of England, but has decided, after representations from senior police officers, to refer to her only as Officer A, and to use pixellated pictures of her.

Meanwhile politicians across Europe demanded information about the activities of Kennedy, the first undercover operative identified, who was on Tuesday accused of having had several sexual relationships with activists while undercover. Senior police sources have described these relationships as "unacceptable".

His UK-based handlers have flown to the US in an attempt to find an agent now accepted to have "gone rogue".

Aside from questions over his conduct while undercover, Kennedy, a Metropolitan police officer, committed a serious breach of protocol when he told friends from the protest movement that Officer A was his colleague. A police chief with detailed knowledge of the deployments of undercover officers in the protest movement said Kennedy's breach of protocol could lead to the "relocation of a considerable number of people".

That included undercover officers currently involved in ongoing police investigations across the UK and their families. "This is serious stuff," the police chief said. "Lots of people are at risk – their lives are at risk."

Kennedy, who has expressed remorse over an operation he told friends was "wrong", now appears to have been a key player in a pan-European network of leftwing and environmental groups.

Using a fake passport, he travelled to more than 22 countries from his base in Nottingham. A parliamentarian in Germany said Kennedy had been "operating on the border of illegality" in the country, and demanded disclosure about the operation. Kennedy's activities in Iceland, Ireland and Italy are also coming under scrutiny.

Documents obtained by the Guardian also suggest that, after quitting the Met last March, Kennedy attempted to continue to use his adopted identity to infiltrate protest groups. In an indication he planned to turn his hand to corporate espionage, Kennedy, who is said to have had money problems, set up two companies. One is connected to an individual who previously worked at Global Open, a private security firm set up by a former special branch detective. The company specialises in keeping a "discreet watch" on protest groups.

Police chiefs discussed the unfolding crisis at a meeting of the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) yesterday, which has limited company status and to which Kennedy and Officer A were seconded.

It is now believed several undercover police officers have been living long-term in the environmental movement, feeding intelligence back to the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU), an Acpo body that runs a nationwide intelligence database of political activists. After concerns were raised about the accountability of NPOIU, police chiefs came up with a plan to move the unit to Scotland Yard. Subject to agreement, the unit will be taken over by Met officers next month.

However, a major review will now be under way into the oversight of officers such as Kennedy. Explaining why he and Officer A had spent so long undercover, the police chief said: "It is simply because of the environment. If you are a deeply ideologically motivated person … then getting close to you to understand your thought processes – and some idea of what you're doing – takes a lot longer."

He added that Kennedy's numerous sexual relations with women would not have been officially sanctioned. "That is conduct that is not acceptable," he said.

Events radical attended here

SOME events attended by Pc Mark Kennedy:

* Grassroots Gathering April 2004 — Dublin.

* Mayday 2004 EU Summit protest — Dublin.

* June 2004 Anti-Bush protest Shannon Airport.

* April 2005 — Clare and Shannon Airport where he addressed activists on how to take “direct action” against US flights landing at Shannon.

* Anarchist Bookfair March 2006 — Dublin.

* Corrib protests March 2006 — Mayo.