Former head of the Army in police quiz over Troubles death from 45 years ago
WITCH-HUNT AGAINST OUR HEROES
THE former head of the Army was quizzed by police over the killing of a paramilitary in Belfast more than 45 years ago, he revealed last night.
Lord Dannatt disclosed for the first time that on his last day as Chief of the General Staff before his retirement in 2009, he was visited by two Northern Ireland police investigators.
Lord Dannatt also called for an end to ‘retrospective investigation’ into the conduct of British troops during the Troubles. Writing in The Daily Telegraph, he recalled his response to questions from the Police Service of Northern Ireland’s (PSNI) historical inquiries team over the killing of a young man in Belfast 36 years before.
‘ In as polite a way as possible, I explained that if the soldier standing next to you has just been shot dead, that might just explain a return of fire from my soldiers,’ he said.
‘Terrorists must accept the consequences of their actions – as the military and civil police concluded at the time.’
The PSNI has sparked anger by reexamining every Army killing between 1968 and 1998, and the Daily Mail has led the calls to end the witch-hunt against former soldiers.
Lord Dannatt said there was now a suspicion among veterans of the conflict that the non-self-incriminatory basis on which they had given evidence in the 2010 Saville inquiry into the Bloody Sunday killings in 1972 had been breached and there may be further investigation.
Lord Dannatt, who was awarded the Military Cross for his service in Ulster, highlighted ‘ troubling issues’ with the retrospective investigations into British troops.
‘First, while the Army kept extremely good operational records, the terrorists did not,’ he said. ‘This makes a very uneven playing field on which to conduct these retrospective investigations.’
All allegations were investigated at the time, he added, arguing that revisiting the evidence decades later was unlikely to provide any greater clarity.
Lord Dannatt also argued that only 10 per cent of the 2,547 cases referred to the new PSNI Legacy Investigation Board were deemed to be British Army or Royal Ulster Constabulary cases.
‘But the reality is that 90 per cent of killings by nationalist and loyalist terrorists were murder by any description of the word, while the 10 per cent attributable to the security forces were deaths brought about by troops and policemen doing their lawful duty,’ he said.