McGuinness took IRA victims’ secrets to his grave, say families
SENIOR police officers decided not to pursue Martin McGuinness over his alleged role in an IRA atrocity, it was claimed last night, as victims’ families said he had taken secrets to his grave.
It has now emerged, following the death of Mr McGuinness at the age of 66 on Monday night, that police officers were allegedly told to drop the investigation into the senior Sinn Fein leader and former IRA chief of staff over the 1972 Claudy bombing, which killed nine people, because any prosecution would have been too “politically sensitive”.
Sources have told The Daily Telegraph that detectives with the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) believed by around 2007 that they had accumulated enough evidence against Mr McGuinness to question him over his role in what became known as “Bloody Monday”, when three car bombs were set off in the town in one of the worst outrages of the Troubles. But it is now claimed that senior PSNI officers ordered the investigation be closed down for fear that any attempt to prosecute Mr McGuinness would wreck the delicate Northern Ireland peace process.
The source said: “There was an appetite among a number of PSNI detectives to pursue the case against
McGuinness over his role in the Claudy bombings.
“But when they approached senior officers they were told: ‘We are not prosecuting Martin McGuinness.’ It was felt by the top brass of the PSNI that it would have been simply too damaging to the peace process.”
The Claudy bombing took place on July 31 1972, when three car bombs were blown up in the town’s Main Street, killing nine people, including two teenagers and Kathryn Eakin, aged eight.
The Provisional IRA issued an immediate denial of responsibility and later claimed that “an internal court of inquiry” had found that its local unit did not carry out the attack. However, in August 2010, following an eight-year investigation, the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland published a report into the bombing which stated that the Royal Ulster Constabulary believed that the alleged role of Father James Chesney, a local Roman Catholic priest thought to be the IRA’s director of operations in South Derry, in the bombing was covered up by senior police officers, government ministers and the Roman Catholic hierarchy.
No action was ever taken against Fr Chesney, who died in 1980.
On the 40th anniversary of the bombing Mr McGuinness, who had been second in command of the Derry Brigade at the time, described the attack as “appalling and indefensible” and “inflicted on totally innocent people”. The Claudy bombing claims come as families of IRA victims expressed their fears that Mr McGuinness’s death meant he had has taken to his grave the truth about dozens of unsolved murders.
Austin Stack, whose father, an Irish prison officer, was murdered by the IRA in 1983, said there were serious questions over Mr McGuinness’s role in some of the worst atrocities of the period.
He said: “I’m very aware of the fact that Martin McGuinness had questions to answer in relation to the Claudy bomb, there were questions over the Enniskillen bomb and he also had questions to answer in relation to the death of Frank Hegarty. There are people who never got their answers.”