IRA informer is spared jail over extreme images
AN IRA double agent avoided jail yesterday despite admitting accessing appalling online images after a judge was told his life remains in danger.
Freddie Scappaticci, 72, is living under a new identity in a secret location after he was named as an Army informer codenamed Stakeknife.
Police discovered he had been accessing disturbing sexual material, often involving animals, while investigating claims he is complicit in up to 18 murders. None of the images involved children.
Amid conditions of extreme secrecy, he appeared before Westminster magistrates and was sentenced to a suspended jail term. The court was told he could not be put behind bars or ordered to undertake community service because of the threat of paramilitary killers seeking revenge.
Scappaticci, the former leader of the IRA’s internal security unit, known as the ‘nutting squad’, is a notorious figure of the Troubles.
Despite being linked to the interrogation and murder of suspected spies, he was later accused of being a high-ranking British spy himself.
He is now at the centre of a £35million investigation into alleged British complicity in atrocities and was arrested ten months ago on suspicion of murder. As part of that inquiry, Bedfordshire Police examined a laptop from his safe house. Experts found it had been used to look up extreme pornography.
When arrested Scappaticci told officers he had suffered from depression for 30 years and did not derive any sexual gratification from viewing the images. ‘It just seems to lift me,’ he said. He said that he had to leave Ireland, where his estranged wife still lives, because ‘otherwise he would be murdered’.
During a brief hearing in court Scappaticci, wearing a shabby blue fleece and green tracksuit bottoms, admitted two charges of possessing extreme pornographic images relating to at least 329 images.
Chief Magistrate Emma Arbuthnot sentenced him to three months in jail, suspended for 12 months. She told him: ‘You have not been before the court for 50 years – and that’s good character in my book.’
After being exposed in 2003, Scappaticci fled Ulster and called on the Government to confirm he was not a spy. Ministers refused and his lawyers were granted a High Court order banning anyone from revealing his new identity or location.