Scotland Yard accused of ’trying to hide its secrets’ after appealing for police sex case to go to secret court

Scotland Yard has been accused of ‘trying to hide its secrets’ after appealing for a case involving female activists who were ‘conned into sexual relationships’ with undercover police officers to be heard in secret.

One man and 11 women from environmental activist groups are seeking damages from Scotland Yard for the ‘emotional trauma’ they suffered when undercover officers allegedly tricked them into having sexual relationships.

One of the women is planning to sue the Met for the financial burden of bringing up a child, now 27, fathered by an officer, it was reported.

Controversial: Scotland Yard has been accused of ’trying to hide its secrets’ after appealing for a case involving female activists who were ‘conned into sexual relationships’ with undercover police officers to be heard in secret

But it emerged last night that the Metropolitan Police are aiming to move the case against them from the High Court to a secretive tribunal.

The Met is to appeal this week that some of the cases – which were due to be heard in the High Court – should be heard in the little-known Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) instead.

The IPT, which was established in 2000, has the power to investigate complaints about the conduct of Britain’s Intelligence Agencies, including MI5, MI6 and Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).

But complainants who take cases to the IPT have fewer rights than in court and are not able to choose their own lawyer or cross-examine witnesses.

Most hearings are held in private, no explanation has to be given for the judgement and there is no automatic right of appeal.

The Met claims that because it’s undercover operations were authorised under the Regulation of Investigatory Power Act (Ripa), which is monitored by the IPT, the cases cannot be heard in a normal court.

Action: The cases were sparked after activists exposed Met policeman Mark Kennedy, pictured, as an undercover officer

But critics have accused the Met of covering up its ‘dirty laundry’ by trying to have the cases heard by the IPT – which has upheld fewer than 1 per cent of complaints in its history.

Jenny Jones, deputy chairwoman of City Hall’s police and crime committee, which monitors the Met, told The Times: ‘I’m very concerned about this because clearly the Met is trying to hide its dirty laundry.

‘These women deserve to have their stories told and for people to understand that what happened to them was a complete betrayal of trust.

‘There seems to be a trend of the State clearly trying to hide its secrets and that’s not acceptable.’

The cases were sparked after activists exposed Met policeman Mark Kennedy as an undercover officer, leading to the collapse of a case against people charged with planning to invade a power station.

Several women then came forward to say they had had sexual contact with him, without realising he was a policeman.

…

By Rosie Taylor and Tim Shipman

PUBLISHED: 05:26 GMT, 19 November 2012 | UPDATED: 05:29 GMT, 19 November 2012

Find this story at 19 November 2012

© Associated Newspapers Ltd

Met accused of hiding ‘dirty secrets’ in undercover cases

 

Scotland Yard has been accused of trying to “hide its dirty secrets” after it sought secret hearings for cases brought by female activists who had sexual relationships with undercover police officers.

Eleven women and one man are suing the Met for emotional trauma after claiming they were tricked into forming intimate relationships with undercover officers.

One woman claims an undercover officer fathered her child and is planning a landmark legal claim that will test whether the Met should bear some financial responsibility for the child’s upbringing.

The cases have been lodged in the High Court, but the Met argues that some cases should be heard by the Investigatory Powers Tribunal.

…

Justin Davenport, Crime Edito

Find this story at 19 November 2012

© 2012 Evening Standard Limited

Briton Killed in China Had Spy Links

BEIJING—Cruising around Beijing in a silver Jaguar with “007” in the license plate, Neil Heywood seemed to relish the air of intrigue that surrounded him.

In meetings, the British consultant hinted about his connections to Bo Xilai—the onetime Communist Party highflier—but often he would refuse to hand over a business card. He spoke Mandarin, smoked heavily and worked part time for a dealer of Aston Martin cars, the British brand driven by James Bond. Some thought him a fantasist, others a fraud.

But his contrived aura of mystery appears to have been a double bluff: He had been knowingly providing information about the Bo family to Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, known as MI6, for more than a year when he was murdered in China last November, an investigation by The Wall Street Journal has found.

The revelation is a new twist in the saga of Mr. Bo, whose wife was convicted in August of poisoning Mr. Heywood in his hotel room in the southwestern city of Chongqing, where Mr. Bo was then party chief. The downfall of one of the party’s most powerful families threw into turmoil China’s plans for a once-a-decade leadership transition, due to start at the 18th Party Congress opening Thursday, and raised questions about corruption, abuse of power and bitter personal rivalries within China’s political elite.

The Journal investigation, based on interviews with current and former British officials and close friends of the murdered Briton, found that a person Mr. Heywood met in 2009 later acknowledged being an MI6 officer to him. Mr. Heywood subsequently met that person regularly in China and continued to provide information on Mr. Bo’s private affairs.

China regards the private lives of its leaders as state secrets, and information about them and their families is prized by foreign governments trying to understand the inner workings of an opaque political system.
China’s Leadership Change

See an interactive guide to China’s 18th Communist Party Congress, read more about the outgoing leaders and some candidates for promotion.

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The Chongqing Drama

See key dates in the death of Neil Heywood in Chongqing and the drama surrounding Bo Xilai.

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Players in China’s Leadership Purge

Read more about the players in the case.

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More photos and interactive graphics

British authorities have sought to quell speculation that Mr. Heywood was a spy ever since the Journal reported in March that he had been working occasionally in China for a London-based business-intelligence company founded by a former MI6 officer and staffed by many former spies.

William Hague, the British foreign secretary who oversees MI6, broke with standard policy of not commenting on intelligence matters and issued a statement in April saying Mr. Heywood, who was 41 when he died, was “not an employee of the British government in any capacity.”

That was technically true, according to people familiar with the matter. They said Mr. Heywood wasn’t an MI6 officer, wasn’t paid and was “never in receipt of tasking”—meaning he never was given a specific mission to carry out or asked to seek a particular piece of information.
The Fall of Bo Xilai

Earlier coverage from The Wall Street Journal:
Crash Puts New Focus on China Leaders
Amid China Scandal, Spy Game Unraveled
In Elite China Circle, Briton Feared for His Life
U.K. Seeks Probe Into China Death
China in Transition: Full Coverage

But he was a willful and knowing informant, and his MI6 contact once described him as “useful” to a former colleague. “A little goes a long way,” the former colleague recalls the contact saying in relation to intelligence reports based on Mr. Heywood’s information.

Mr. Heywood’s intelligence links cast new light on the response to his death from British authorities, who initially accepted the local police’s conclusion that he died from “excessive alcohol consumption” and didn’t try to prevent his body from being quickly cremated without an autopsy. The British government didn’t ask China for an investigation until Feb. 15—a week after a former Chongqing police chief, Wang Lijun, fled to a U.S. consulate in China and told U.S. diplomats that Mr. Bo’s wife, Gu Kailai, had murdered the Briton.

There could be implications, too, for Chinese authorities, who would be guilty of a major security breach if they were unaware that MI6 had a source inside the inner family circle of a member of the Politburo—the party’s top 25 leaders—according to people familiar with the matter. If China’s security services were aware of Mr. Heywood’s contacts with MI6, they likely had him under surveillance during his final visit to Chongqing, those people said.

Until the scandal broke, Mr. Bo was a front-runner for promotion to the Politburo Standing Committee—the party’s top decision-making body—in this year’s leadership change.

Mr. Bo, sacked from the Politburo in April, is now facing criminal charges after Chinese authorities accused him in September of a series of offenses, including bribe-taking and interference in the murder investigation into his wife.

Neither Chinese nor British officials have suggested Mr. Heywood was killed because of his MI6 links. A Chinese court found Ms. Gu guilty in August of killing him because she thought he threatened her son over a business dispute, according to the state-run Xinhua news agency.

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Zuma Press

Gu Kailai, wife of disgraced Chinese politician Bo Xilai, on trial in August for Mr. Heywood’s murder.

However, friends of Mr. Heywood and prominent Chinese figures have pointed out omissions, ambiguities and inconsistencies in the official account of his killing presented by state media.

And when Mr. Wang fled to the U.S. consulate in Chengdu on Feb. 6, he told U.S. diplomats there that Ms. Gu had confessed to him that she “killed a spy,” according to one person who has seen a transcript of what Mr. Wang said.

A spokesman for Britain’s Foreign Office declined to comment on what was said in the U.S. consulate, and, when asked about Mr. Heywood’s relationship with MI6, referred back to Mr. Hague’s statement in April.

Asked whether Mr. Heywood had been knowingly passing information to an MI6 officer, without being a government employee, the spokesman said: “We do not comment on intelligence matters or allegations of intelligence matters.” Mr. Heywood’s MI6 contact declined to comment.

Former intelligence officials say most informants and agents in the field aren’t considered employees because they rarely have a contract and aren’t necessarily paid, but people are usually registered as “knowing” sources and assigned a code name if they are providing information to someone who has acknowledged being an MI6 officer.

Mr. Heywood’s Chinese wife, Lulu, declined to comment. His mother and sister didn’t respond to requests for comment through an intermediary. China’s Foreign Ministry didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Heywood was a potentially risky choice as an informant, not least because of the 007 license plate on his Jaguar. He was, on the other hand, an old-fashioned patriot with a taste for adventure. He was in the rare position of having regular contact with the family of a Politburo member as well as intimate knowledge of their private affairs, according to several of his closest friends. Ms. Gu was godmother to his daughter, Olivia, according to one close friend.

He got to know the family in the 1990s while living in the northeastern city of Dalian, where Mr. Bo was mayor at the time, according to several of his friends, and had become part of an “inner circle” of friends and advisers.

Mr. Heywood kept a low profile in the expatriate community, according to people who knew him, using his connections in China to build a modest freelance consultancy business advising companies and individuals on how to navigate Chinese politics and bureaucracy.

He had dealings with several British companies and politicians, including at least two members of Britain’s House of Lords—the upper house of Parliament. One of those peers met Mr. Heywood several times in the company of his MI6 contact, according to people familiar with the matter.

In the last two years of his life, Mr. Heywood’s relationship with the Bo family deteriorated, especially after Ms. Gu became convinced she had been betrayed by a member of her “inner circle” and demanded that Mr. Heywood divorce his wife and swear an oath of allegiance to Ms. Gu, according to friends of Mr. Heywood.

Mr. Heywood informed his contact of this, according to people familiar with the matter. The contact warned him at one point that he should be careful not to become “a headline,” but continued meeting him and filing confidential reports on those meetings, according to those people.

Mr. Heywood hadn’t seen Mr. Bo for more than a year when he died and had been making plans to leave China, but he appeared to be trying to persuade the Bo family to pay him money he felt he was owed, according to close friends. They said he seemed stressed and increasingly concerned that his emails and phone calls were being monitored. He also had put on weight and begun to smoke more heavily.

“He definitely felt that he should have got more out of the relationship” with the Bo family, said one close friend. “That may explain why he agreed to go to Chongqing that last time. I think he was still hoping to get what he thought he was owed.”

Mr. Heywood flew to Chongqing on Nov. 13 after being summoned at short notice to a meeting with the Bo family, according to Xinhua. He believed he was “in trouble,” according to one friend he contacted that day.

He was murdered that night in his hotel room. According to an official account of Ms. Gu’s trial from Xinhua, she poured potassium cyanide in his mouth after he vomited from drunkenness and asked for a drink of water.

The Foreign Office said that no British officials, including MI6 officers, were in contact with him in the 48 hours before his death, but declined to comment on when and how it became aware of his relationship with the Bo family and that he had been summoned to Chongqing to meet them.

Mr. Heywood’s body was found on Nov. 15, and the British consulate was informed by local authorities the next day, according to a statement by Mr. Hague to Parliament.

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Reuters

Mr. Heywood’s body was found last Nov. 15 at the Nanshan Lijing Holiday Hotel, and Ms. Gu was subsequently convicted of fatally poisoning him.

Chongqing authorities initially told Mr. Heywood’s wife, who had traveled to Chongqing, that he had died of a heart attack, while informing the consulate that he died of “excessive alcohol consumption,” according to British officials. They said the body was cremated on Nov. 18 without an autopsy, but with the permission of Mr. Heywood’s wife.

British consular officials formally expressed to their superiors their concern and suspicion about how Chinese authorities handled Mr. Heywood’s death, but other British officials believed that asking for an investigation would be problematic, according to people with knowledge of the events.

The British officials who initially handled Mr. Heywood’s death are unlikely to have known about his MI6 links or his connection to the Bo family, these people said, but intelligence officials in Beijing and London would have been aware at the time of his death, or made aware soon after.

Britain’s Foreign Office says it had no reason to suspect foul play until members of the British community began raising suspicions on Jan. 18. But the Foreign Office didn’t raise the matter with Chinese authorities until almost a month later—after Mr. Wang’s flight to the U.S. consulate in Chengdu.

U.S. officials informed British authorities about Mr. Wang’s allegations while he was still in the consulate on Feb. 7, according to the Foreign Office. It also told the Journal that a British diplomat was sent to Chengdu to try to meet Mr. Wang, but arrived after he had left the consulate.

Mr. Hague has said that the British Embassy first asked the Chinese central government to investigate Mr. Heywood’s death on Feb. 15. But British authorities didn’t make that public until more than a month later—a delay that confused some U.S. officials following the matter.

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Getty Images

Two British diplomats outside the Hefei Intermediate People’s Court in Anhui, China, where Gu Kailai was tried for Mr. Heywood’s murder.

“We couldn’t understand what the British were waiting for,” said one U.S. official who was unaware of any links between Mr. Heywood and MI6.

…

Write to Jeremy Page at jeremy.page@wsj.com

Updated November 6, 2012, 4:47 a.m. ET

Find this story at 6 November 2011

Copyright ©2012 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Murdered British businessman ‘was MI6 operative’ (we told you so)

An investigation by The Wall Street Journal has concluded that Neil Heywood, the British businessman who was murdered in China last November, was an active informant for British intelligence at the time of his death. The news appears to confirm intelNews’ assessment of April 2012 that Heywood was in fact connected with British intelligence. A highly successful financial consultant and fluent Chinese speaker who had lived in China for over a decade, Heywood was found dead on November 14, 2011, in his room at the Nanshan Lijing Holiday Hotel in Chongqing. His death led to the dramatic downfall of Bo Xilai and Gu Kailai, a husband-and-wife team of political celebrities who were found guilty in a Chinese court of killing the British businessman. Immediately after Heywood’s death, there was widespread speculation that he may have been a spy for MI6, Britain’s external intelligence service. On April 27, 2012, I argued that I was not aware of anyone “with serious knowledge of intelligence issues who was not completely certain, or did not deeply suspect, that Heywood had indeed collaborated with British intelligence at some stage during the past decade”. I wrote this in the face of an official denial by British Foreign Secretary William Hague, who had said earlier in the week that “Heywood was not an employee of the British government in any capacity”. Now an extensive investigation by The Wall Street Journal has concluded that the dead British businessman had been an MI6 operative “for more than a year” prior to his death. The paper said it concluded that based on several interviews with unnamed “current and former British officials” as well as with close friends of the murdered man. One source told The Journal that Heywood had been willingly and consciously recruited by an MI6 officer, who met with him on a regular basis in China. Heywood allegedly provided the MI6 officer with inside information on Xilai and other senior Chinese government officials. The article quotes an unnamed British official as saying that Heywood’s MI6 handler once described him as “useful” to a former colleague. According to the paper, Heywood’s MI6 work does not technically contradict the British Foreign secretary’s statement that the late businessman had not been “an employee of the British government”.

…

November 7, 2012 by Joseph Fitsanakis 8 Comments

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |

Find this story at 7 November 2012

Newly released MI5 files include early Cold War diaries

Files from the Security Service (MI5) released to The National Archives today include the personal post-war diaries of Guy Liddell, then Deputy Director General of MI5.

Liddell’s diaries cover the period 1945 to 1953 and provide a fascinating new insight into the early Cold War era. Daily entries record Liddell’s impressions of key moments including the discovery in 1949 that the Soviet Union had tested its first atomic bomb, the uncovering of the spy Klaus Fuchs and the defection of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean.

During the Second World War, Liddell had been head of counter-espionage, and his wartime diaries were released to The National Archives in 2002 (KV 4/185-196).

This 29th release of Security Service records contains 77 files and brings the total number of Security Service records in the KV series at The National Archives to 5,003.

Liddell’s diaries are available to view online and will be free to download for one month. Professor Christopher Andrew, author of The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5, has recorded a podcast about the new files.
Highlights

Other highlights from this release, available to view at Kew, include:
A ten-volume file on one of Britain’s leading Communist journalists, Sam Lesser, which covers his career from his time as a volunteer with the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War to becoming the Daily Worker’s foreign correspondent and foreign editor at the height of the Cold War in the early 1960s (KV 2/3741-KV 2/3750)
Austro-German Prince Hubertus Lowenstein came to Britain after Hitler took power in Germany. An active, if eccentric, anti-Nazi he was anxious to build a Germany free from National Socialism and his personal ambition was said to be no less than the German throne (KV 2/3716)
Catholic priest Henry Borynski served in a largely Polish parish in Bradford in the early 1950s before his sudden and unexplained disappearance in 1953. There was initial speculation that he had been ‘kidnapped by Red Agents and taken behind the Iron Curtain’ but the case remains unsolved (KV 2/3722-KV 2/3724)

Find this story at 26 October 2012

Declassified spymaster’s diary reveals UK-US espionage tensions with ‘gangster’ Hoover

LONDON — Overstaffed, overconfident and all too often over here.

That’s how a top British spymaster saw his American counterparts at the FBI and CIA, according to newly declassified diaries from the years after World War II.

Friction between British spies and their American colleagues is a recurring theme in journals kept by Guy Liddell, the postwar deputy director of Britain’s domestic intelligence agency, MI5.

The diaries, published for the first time Friday by Britain’s National Archives, show Liddell was frustrated by FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover — “a cross between a political gangster and a prima donna” — and skeptical of the brand-new U.S. espionage service, the CIA.

“In the course of time … they may produce something of value,” Liddell wrote of the CIA in September 1947 after a meeting with its deputy director, Edwin Kennedy Wright.

“There is a great deal of ‘dissemination, evaluation and coordination,’ but of course the thing that really matters is whether they have anything that is worth disseminating, evaluating, or coordinating,” Liddell said.

Liddell also noted that Wright had told British intelligence officials that “in an American organization 500 people were employed to do what 50 people would do over here.”

Archives historian Stephen Twigge said the transatlantic relationship was marked by “a certain friction towards what the British might think of as the Johnny-come-latelies in the CIA.”

Britain and the U.S. were staunch wartime and Cold War allies, but the intelligence-sharing relationship was sometimes troubled. It reached a low ebb after the conviction in 1950 of Klaus Fuchs, a German-British nuclear scientist charged with passing atomic weapons secrets to the Soviet Union.

Hoover, outraged by the security lapse and angered that Britain would not let the Americans interview Fuchs in prison, threatened to cut off intelligence cooperation.

Liddell accused Hoover of “unscrupulous” behavior.

“Hoover, finding himself in something of a jam, is obviously taking British security for a ride … Hoover’s next move was to go before some other committee and say that the British made a muck of the Fuchs case,” he wrote.

Liddell called the American attitude “wholly wrong, stupid and unreasonable.”

“It merely shows how utterly incapable they are of seeing anybody’s point of view except their own, and that they are quite ready to cut off their noses to spite their faces!”

Twigge, however, said the Americans had a point — “half the British secret service turns out to have been penetrated by Soviet intelligence.”

The diaries cover a dark period for British intelligence, during which several senior agents were exposed as Soviet spies. Liddell was tainted by his friendship with Guy Burgess, one of the “Cambridge Spies” secretly working for the Russians.

The diaries show that Liddell doubted Burgess’ guilt. “My own view was that Guy Burgess was not the sort of person who would deliberately pass confidential information to unauthorized parties,” he wrote in 1950.

Liddell was shaken by the disappearance of Burgess and Donald Maclean, who defected to Moscow in 1951, and was himself questioned as a possible double agent. He retired from MI5 in 1953 and died of heart failure in 1958.

“As time has gone on it’s pretty apparent he wasn’t a Soviet agent,” Twigge said. “Just unlucky in his friends.”

A previous installment of Liddell’s diaries, covering World War II, was declassified in 2002.

The new volumes reveal the life of a postwar spymaster to be extremely varied. Liddell attended the Nuremberg trials of senior Nazis, where he saw figures including Hermann Goering — “one of the few who had much spunk left in him” — and Rudolf Hess, who “appeared to be entirely indifferent to the proceedings.”

Another entry recorded a briefing about a UFO sighting, of which Liddell was skeptical.

…

By Associated Press, Published: October 25

Find this story at 25 October 2012

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

© The Washington Post Company

CCTV increases people’s sense of anxiety

Caretakers and community workers are the way to improve safety in deprived communities, not more technology

Not long ago, I was shown around an award-winning housing estate in east London, which was the proud recipient of a Secured by Design (SBD) award. The housing on the gated estate had small windows, reinforced steel doors and grey, aluminium, military-style roofs. The overall effect was oppressive.

High levels of security have come to characterise our public buildings. This is because security has become a prerequisite of planning permission as a result of SBD, which is a design policy that has the blessing of the police. Administered by the Association of Chief Police Officers, SBD is funded by the 480 security companies that sell the goods needed to meet the required standards. The unintended effects that this approach has had on fear and trust in communities are the subject of my forthcoming report, Fortress Britain, from the New Economics Foundation thinktank.

SBD has its roots in the idea of “defensible space”, created by the American architect and town planner Oscar Newman in the early 1970s, as a result of research he carried out in three deprived New York housing projects. His main finding was that “territoriality” created space that could defend itself. By marking out boundaries clearly, residents would feel a sense of ownership over communal spaces and would discourage strangers and opportunistic criminals from entering.

Newman’s considerable influence led to the adoption of Crime Prevention through Environmental Design in the US, the design policy that was imported as SBD into Britain, where it began life as a regional crime reduction initiative in the late 1980s.

Both in the US and in Britain the idea of defensible space was very popular because it provided a simple solution: rather than engaging with complex social relations as the underlying causes of crime, SBD promoted the idea that environmental design was the biggest influence on behaviour.

Today, SBD is based on a combination of defensible space ideas and the purchase of security products, strongly backed by the insurance industry, which provides lower premiums for properties with SBD.

Many of the recommendations, such as the need to provide good locks on windows and doors, are sensible. But the blanket application of SBD standards tends to create a threatening environment, particularly in poorer areas.

For example, in schools and public buildings the first step of SBD is a crime risk assessment, which is about the local area. While high fences, walls or other barriers are a prerequisite for any school, the crime risk assessment will suggest whether additional security measures are necessary. This means that in higher crime areas security is much greater, creating places that have a militarised feel to them. Because higher crime areas tend to be poor, deprived neighbourhoods have become characterised by public buildings, such as council offices, that come with fortress-like levels of security.

Lack of evidence

One of the main reasons for this report was the lack of evidence that installing gates and CCTV created safe, cohesive and trusting communities. Of the few existing studies, an investigation into CCTV by the then Scottish Office found that, while people often believed CCTV would make them feel safer, the opposite turned out to be the case.

My report, which includes a field study carried out on a Peabody Trust housing estate in central London, hopes to add to this slim body of research. Interviews and focus groups were carried out with residents and practitioners working in neighbourhood management, estate services and youth services on Peabody Avenue, an estate where 55 new homes have recently been completed.

What we found independently was that, although increased security, and in particular CCTV, was often very popular with residents, it did not necessarily lead to feelings of increased safety, with residents reporting that the presence of CCTV could instead increase anxiety.

Security measures including gates and internal doors elicited a similar response, with residents illustrating that “defensible space” can increase fear of strangers. “Because of the doors, if you see someone you don’t know, there is an element of ‘Who is this?'” one resident commented. A practitioner added: “The more you secure a block or an estate, the more it gives a message that something is wrong with that estate.”

Incidents of actual crime were barely mentioned. By far the biggest problem was young people hanging around late into the night in the courtyard of the estate, which is surrounded by housing. On a number of occasions the play area had been vandalised. Because the young people in question were either residents or friends of residents, barring access to the estate through the use of gates did not seem sensible. The study suggested that high security was offered as a technical response to a complex social problem, which required a different kind of solution. It was clear that residents felt that “knowing people”, whether it be caretakers, youth workers or each other, was the key to creating trust.

“The physical security measures – such as gating, intercom systems, CCTV – have increased, and the eyes on the ground have been removed. There’s more CCTV, less manpower,” said one practitioner.

…

• Fortress Britain: high security, insecurity and the challenge of preventing harm, by Anna Minton and Jody Aked. Anna Minton is the 1851 Royal Commission in the Built Environment fellow. She is on Radio 4’s Four Thought at 8.45pm on Wednesday

Anna Minton
The Guardian, Tuesday 30 October 2012 17.00 GMT

Find this story at 30 October 2012

© 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

CCTV out of focus with crime

Closed circuit television camera systems in town and city centres have failed to match their anti-crime expectations, according to a report.

Professor James Ditton, of the Scottish Centre for Criminology, says the cameras have not lived up to their early promise.

After four years of monitoring the monitors, the professor, who led a Scottish Office study into CCTV, has called for an independent watchdog to oversee the use of the technology.

The centre of Glasgow alone is screened day and night by 32 cameras.

“It has been overhyped and I think that is one of the problems,” Prof Ditton told BBC Scotland. “It was allegedly going to give us these magnificent benefits of reducing crime and making the fear of crime diminish to almost nothing.

“Although it probably does have some utility for the police it does not have these wonderful great societal benefits, so we really question whether the benefits it does bring us justify photographing everybody who goes into the city everyday.”

He argued that since the Glasgow cameras were switched on in 1994 crime had fallen more sharply elsewhere than under their gaze.

He said street surveys had shown people do not feel any safer now.

Professor Ditton also said the cameras had not proved cost effective, producing just one arrest every 40 days.

“We were very surprised by the findings. We had done some previous research in Airdrie where CCTV started in Scotland and where we found there was quite a significant fall in crime after the installation of the cameras,” he said.

“To be honest, we expected to find the same in the Glasgow and we were very surprised to find it didn’t really happen.”

The report said there had been no sign of the investment, jobs or visitors it was promised the cameras would generate.

But because CCTV systems are spreading across the country and some have a wide focus, the professor is advocating the creation of an independent watchdog to monitor the way the cameras are used.

‘Vastly overhyped

He said people may begin to question whether they want the police secretly to tape them in public.

“The cameras were so vastly overhyped as a magic bullet cure for everything when they were introduced, that we were all blinded to the fact that this was a small addition in police terms, but a rather large incursion in civil liberty terms,” said Professor Ditton.

Edinburgh city centre CCTV operator Gary Ogilvie responded to the report by insisting on the benefits of the system.

Mr Ogilvie said: “The cameras can cover large areas very quickly.

“We are identifying things which we can get the police travelling to quickly.

“In Edinburgh we have an excellent relationship with the police and we get very good response times.

“This is something the business community in Edinburgh has commented upon – that response times to incidents since CCTV went in have been much improved,” he added.

But a Scottish Executive spokesman said while the government was disappointed with the figures in the research, it still believed CCTV made a significant contribution to cutting crime.

“The Scottish Executive believes that the majority of CCTV schemes help to prevent crime and allay public concerns,” he said.

CCTV ‘fails to cut crime and anxiety’
Doubts on £170m extension plan

Gerard Seenan, Guardian, 15/7/99

Closed circuit television cameras, one of the government’s key weapons in the war against crime, neither reduce crime nor the fear of it, according to one of the most comprehensive investigations carried out on the subject.

A report prepared for the Scottish office concludes that CCTV has not succeeded in making the streets safer or in making people feel safer.

The results follow similar conclusions by researchers in Wales last week, and cast doubt on the government’s decision to spend £170m extending CCTV across Britain.

The research, carried out over a two year period in Glasgow, reveals that in the first year after CCTV was introduced crime rose in the city by 9%. The crime clear-up rate dropped by 4% over the same period.

Jason Ditton, professor of criminology at Sheffield university, who led the research, said he believed the results should open up debate on CCTV and how it was regulated.

“What we have been able to show is that CCTV didn’t reduce crime – if anything it has increased – and it didn’t reduce fear of crime. If anything there was a slight increase in anxiety.”

The researchers surveyed Glaswegians before the CCTV system was set up and found that most said they would feel safer if their city was protected by CCTV.

But after one year of operation, most said they did not feel any safer, and more people said they would avoid the city centre.

Simon Davies, director of the pressure group Privacy International, said the research should prompt a fresh look at the use of CCTV in Britain.

“The claim that people feel safer because of the technology has been clearly shown to be misleading;’ Mr Davies said.

A spokeswoman for the home office said the government had never claimed CCTV was a panacea, but it still had great faith in its usefulness.

The Scottish executive, which received the report, said it would still continue with its expansion of CCTV in Scotland.

“The effect of Closed Circuit Television on recorded crime rates and public concern about crime rates in Glasgow” by Prof. Jason Ditton is published by the Scottish Office, ISBN 07480 85416.

Find this story at 14 July 1999

BBC Online, Wednesday, July 14, 1999 Published at 12:52 GMT 13:52 UK

UK supreme court says rendition of Pakistani man was unlawful

Yunus Rahmatullah has been imprisoned since he was handed by the SAS to US forces in 2004, but has never been charged

Undated Reprieve handout photo of Yunus Rahmatullah. Photograph: Reprieve/PA

Human rights campaigners have called for a full criminal investigation into the rendition of a Pakistani man by UK and US forces to Afghanistan, following a supreme court judgment describing his subsequent detention at the notorious US prison at Bagram as unlawful. Yunus Rahmatullah has been imprisoned ever since he was handed over by the SAS to American forces in Iraq in 2004, and has never been charged.

Lawyers for the man argued before the UK’s highest court that the government should apply pressure on the US to release him. The court of appeal had previously issued a writ of habeas corpus – an ancient law that demands a prisoner is released from unlawful detention – requiring the UK to seek Rahmatullah’s return or at least demonstrate why it could not. However, the US authorities refused to cooperate, arguing that they would discuss Rahmatullah’s situation with the Pakistani government.

Lawyers for William Hague and Philip Hammond, the foreign and defence secretaries, had argued that they had no power “to direct the US” to release him and that it would be inappropriate for the courts to instruct them to ask the US authorities to return Rahmatullah.

Rejecting this argument, a panel of seven supreme court judges ruled that the UK did not need to have actual custody to exercise control over his release. The UK’s most senior judges also declared that there was clear evidence that Rahmatullah’s rendition and detention was a breach of international human rights law, despite “memorandums of understanding” Britain had agreed with the US over treatment of detainees.

Lord Kerr said: “The, presumably forcible, transfer of Mr Rahmatullah from Iraq to Afghanistan is, at least prima facie, a breach of article 49 [of the fourth Geneva Convention]. On that account alone, his continued detention post-transfer is unlawful.”

Kerr also said that he would have “little hesitation in dismissing” arguments from former US assistant attorney general Jack Goldsmith asserting that al-Qaida operatives found in occupied Iraq were excluded from protection under the Geneva Conventions during armed conflict.

However, the court was split 5-2 in a decision to reject arguments by Rahmatullah’s lawyers that there was more that the UK government could do following the American’s refusal to respond to the habeas corpus writ. Rahmatullah was represented by legal charity Reprieve and solicitors Leigh Day, who argued that the UK should have made more effort to demand his release.

In a dissenting judgment, Lady Hale and Lord Carnwath said: “Where liberty is at stake, it is not the court’s job to speculate as to the political sensitivities which may be in play.”

Reprieve’s director, Clive Stafford Smith, said: “This powerful supreme court decision has huge ramifications. Clearly there will now have to be a full criminal investigation. But if the US has ‘dishonoured’ its commitment to the UK in this case for the first time in 150 years, and continues to violate law as basic as the Geneva conventions, this also throws other extradition agreements with the UK into doubt.”

Reprieve’s legal director, Kat Craig, added: “The UK government has nowhere left to turn. The highest court in the country has expressed serious concerns that grave war crimes may have been committed as a result of which a police investigation must be initiated without delay.”

Yunus Rahmatullah and Amanatullah Ali, both Pakistani men, are suspected of having travelled to Iraq to fight for al-Qaida. MI6 is understood to have tracked them as they travelled across Iran and into Iraq early in 2004. After they settled into a house in southern Baghdad a decision was taken to raid the building.

…

Maya Wolfe-Robinson and Ian Cobain
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 31 October 2012 14.59 GMT

Find this story at 31 October 2012

© 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

Hillsborough investigation should be extended to Orgreave, says NUM leader

Chris Kitchen calls for IPCC to widen investigation into alleged cover-up over framing of 95 picketing miners in 1984 strikes

A picket injured during clashes with police at the Orgreave plant in 1984. The NUM is calling for investigations into South Yorkshire police cover-ups over framing of miners. Photograph: PA Archive/Press Association Ima

The police complaints watchdog is under pressure to widen its investigation into alleged fabrication of evidence by South Yorkshire officers in the 1980s as new allegations emerge of attempts to frame miners at the Orgreave coking plant clashes.

Chris Kitchen, general secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers, said the Independent Police Complaints Commission and the director of public prosecutions, Keir Starmer QC, should include in their examination of South Yorkshire police’s post-Hillsborough “cover-up” the force’s alleged framing of 95 miners for serious criminal offences after Orgreave.

“Many miners were subjected to malpractice during the strike by South Yorkshire police – and other forces,” Kitchen told the Guardian. “I will be asking the NUM’s national executive committee to consider complaining to the IPCC and DPP for the police operations at Orgreave and elsewhere during the strike to be investigated, now the details of what South Yorkshire police did at Hillsborough have been revealed.”

At Orgreave in 1984, police officers on horseback and on foot were filmed beating picketing miners with truncheons, but South Yorkshire police claimed the miners had attacked them first, and prosecuted 95 men for riot and unlawful assembly, which carried potential life sentences. All 95 were acquitted after the prosecution case collapsed following revelations in court that police officers’ statements had been dictated to them in order to establish evidence of a riot, and one officer’s signature on a statement had been forged.

On Monday night, a BBC1 Inside Out documentary, to be broadcast in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, features a retired police inspector who was on duty at Orgreave, Norman Taylor, recalling that he and other officers had parts of their statements dictated to them. “I recall this policeman in plain clothes mentioning that he had a good idea of what had happened. And that there was a preamble to set the scene,” Taylor told the programme. “He was reading from some paper, a paragraph or so. And he asked the people who were there to use that as their starting paragraph.”

Taylor said the paragraph was “basically the time and date, the name of the place”.

However, a barrister specialising in criminal trials, Mark George QC, analysed 40 police officers’ Orgreave statements, and found that many contained identical descriptions of alleged disorder by the miners. To prove the offence of riot, the prosecution has to establish a scene of general disorder within which a defendant committed a particular act, for example throwing a stone, which would otherwise carry a much lesser charge.

George found that 34 officers’ statements, supposed to have been compiled separately, used the identical phrase: “Periodically there was missile throwing from the back of the pickets.”

One paragraph, of four full sentences, was identical word for word in 22 separate statements. It described an alleged charge by miners, including the phrase: “There was however a continual barrage of missiles.”

Michael Mansfield QC, who defended three of the acquitted miners, described South Yorkshire police’s evidence then as “the biggest frame-up ever”. He is now acting for the Hillsborough Family Support Group, which has campaigned since the 1989 disaster for the South Yorkshire police officers responsible on the day – and those responsible for the scheme afterwards to blame the disaster on the fans, which Mansfield labels a cover-up – to be held accountable. “South Yorkshire police operated a culture of fabricating evidence with impunity, which was not reformed after Orgreave, and allowed to continue to Hillsborough five years later,” Mansfield said. “The current investigations by the IPCC and DPP into the force’s malpractice related to Hillsborough should include other malpractice by the same force at the time.”

South Yorkshire police paid £425,000 in 1991 to settle civil actions brought by 39 miners for what happened at and after Orgreave, including for assault, wrongful arrest and malicious prosecution, but no police officer was ever disciplined for any misconduct. The operation and prosecutions were given unqualified backing, even after they collapsed, by the chief constable, Peter Wright. Last month, the Hillsborough Independent Panel’s report revealed that Wright personally oversaw the South Yorkshire police operation to blame supporters for the 1989 Hillsborough disaster, including by briefing false stories to the media, and the wholesale changing of junior officers’ statements.

The IPCC announced on 12 October that South Yorkshire police had referred its conduct at and after Hillsborough to the IPCC for possible misconduct and criminal offences, including perverting the course of justice and perjury. Starmer announced that he would examine all the evidence brought to him to consider whether criminal charges should be brought.

On the collapsed prosecutions after Orgreave, South Yorkshire police told the Guardian in a statement: “We note the NUM’s intention and will await any decision from the IPCC. As always, SYP will co-operate fully with the IPCC in whatever it does. The force is not aware of any adverse comment about the [police] statements from the trial judge in the [Orgreave] case. If concerns existed then normal practice would have been for the judge to raise them at the time.”

David Conn
The Guardian, Sunday 21 October 2012 18.53 BST

Find this story at 21 October 2012

© 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

‘Unacceptable force’ used by G4S staff deporting pregnant woman

Disclosure in first report of prisons inspector on UK Border Agency’s ‘family-friendly’ Cedars unit near Gatwick

G4S staff manage security and the facilities at Cedars, the UK Border Agency’s holding centre near Gatwick for families facing deportation. Photograph: David Jones/PA

A pregnant woman in a wheelchair was tipped up and had her feet held by staff from G4S, the firm behind the Olympics security shambles, as she was forcibly removed from the country. The disclosure comes in the first report into conditions at a new centre designed to hold families facing deportation from the UK.

Nick Hardwick, the chief inspector of prisons, and his team made an unannounced inspection of Cedars, the UK Border Agency’s new pre-departure accommodation near Gatwick, where families are housed for the final 72 hours before they are removed from the UK.

Nick Clegg promised in the Liberal Democrats’ 2010 manifesto that he would put an end to the detention of children. Replacing the controversial Yarl’s Wood detention centre with Cedars was at the heart of the coalition’s family-friendly removal policy.

Hardwick said the unit is “an exceptional facility [which] has many practices which should be replicated in other areas of detention.”

“It is to the considerable credit of staff at Cedars that children held were, in general, happily occupied and that parents were able to concentrate on communication with solicitors, family and friends,” he added.

But inspectors also said unacceptable force was used when a pregnant woman was given a wheelchair in the departures area. When she resisted “substantial force” was used by G4S staff and the wheelchair “was tipped up with staff holding her feet”.

“At one point she slipped down from the chair and the risk of injury to the unborn child was significant,” the report said. “There is no safe way to use force against a pregnant woman, and to initiate it for the purpose of removal is to take an unacceptable risk.”

Inspectors also reported that although most work from family escort staff was commendable, they “observed unprofessional behaviour by an officer on a different escort in the hearing of children”.

The report also said that although “considerable efforts were made to avoid force at the point of removal, it had been used against six of the 39 families going through Cedars”.

Judith Dennis, policy officer at the Refugee Council, said: “The numbers of children in detention are increasing. The government acknowledged then how harmful this practice is for children, so why are they still continuing to do it?

…

Amelia Hill
The Guardian, Tuesday 23 October 2012

Find this story at 23 October 2012
© 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

UK intelligence officers knew of CIA’s rendition plans within days of 9/11

Meeting at British embassy in US raises questions about repeated denials by MI5 and MI6 of connivance in torture

Within days of the 9/11 attacks on the US, the CIA told British intelligence officers of its plans to abduct al-Qaida suspects and fly them to secret prisons where they would be systematically abused.

The meeting, at the British embassy in Washington, is disclosed in a forthcoming book by the Guardian journalist Ian Cobain. It raises serious questions about repeated claims by senior MI5 and MI6 officers that they were slow to appreciate the US response to the attacks, and never connived in torture.

The meeting signalled to British officials that the US was preparing to embark on a global kidnapping programme which became known as extraordinary rendition. Cobain reveals that at the end of a three-hour presentation by Cofer Black, President George Bush’s top counter-terrorist adviser, Mark Allen – his opposite number in MI6 – commented that it all sounded “rather bloodcurdling”.

A few weeks later, in early October 2001, at a secret meeting at Nato headquarters in Brussels, US officials drew up a list of “necessary measures to increase security”, Cobain discloses. They included flights to and from secret prisons in Asia, Africa, and throughout Europe. “Quietly, Britain pledged logistics support for the rendition programme, which resulted in the CIA’s Gulfstream V and other jets becoming frequent visitors to British airports en route to the agency’s secret prisons,” writes Cobain.

Over the next four years CIA rendition flights used British airports at least 210 times. The book reveals that Washington asked the UK for permission to build a large prison on Diego Garcia, the British territory in the Indian Ocean where the US has a large bomber base. The project was dropped, for logistical rather than legal reasons.

However, Diego Garcia was used as a stopover for CIA flights taking detainees to secret prisons around the world. And in secret memos, Labour ministers said in early 2002 that their “preferred option” was to render British nationals to Guantánamo Bay, Cobain records. MI5 and MI6 officers carried out around 100 interrogations at the US prison on Cuba between 2002 and 2004.

Yet for years ministers emphatically denied any British involvement in America’s rendition programme. As late as December 2005, Jack Straw, then foreign secretary, was telling MPs there was “simply no truth in the claims that the United Kingdom has been involved in rendition”. Just a year earlier, we now know, MI6 – under Straw’s watch and with the blessing of ministers, officials say – helped to render two leading Libyan dissidents to Muammar Gaddafi’s secret police.

Despite the post-9/11 Washington embassy and Nato meetings, and other evidence of their early involvement in rendition, MI5 and MI6 witnesses told the parliamentary intelligence and security committee (ISC) that it was some time before they knew what the US was up to. As late as July 2007, the misinformed ISC stated in a report on rendition that MI5 and MI6 “were … slow to detect the emerging pattern of renditions to detention”.

…

Richard Norton-Taylor
guardian.co.uk, Monday 22 October 2012 13.06 BST

Find this story at 22 October 2012

© 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

Ex-MI6 man to face ‘rendition’ questions: Police will try again to interview Sir Mark Allen over torture allegations by Libyan dissidents

Police will seek to interview Sir Mark Allen, the former head of MI6’s counterterrorism unit, in connection with allegations of British complicity in the rendition to Libya and torture of two Libyan dissidents, Abdel Hakim Belhadj and Sami al-Saadi, during the Gaddafi era. Sir Mark suffered a stroke in July, and it is understood Metropolitan Police detectives were told that he was not fit enough at that stage to be interviewed over the allegations.

The two men, members of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, were subjected to years of imprisonment and torture after they were returned to Libya in 2004.

Sir Mark’s health had improved sufficiently for him to address an audience of energy experts at Chatham House, London, last week. A spokeswoman for the British Institute of Energy Economics (BIEE), which organised the event, confirmed that it had taken place but, when asked for further details, stated: “Sir Mark gave a talk, not a presentation, and did not want this [the contents] published.”

A source at BP, where Sir Mark has an office, confirmed: “He had the stroke at the beginning of July and he’s making really good progress.”

Sir Mark’s talk was billed as “his personal reflections on the current situation in the Middle East, the advent of the Arab Spring and considerations about its fallout”.

Coincidentally, BIEE’s president is Lord Howell – a former Foreign Office minister who, in that capacity, fielded questions regarding the rendition scandal and who is now William Hague’s personal adviser on energy and resource security. When The Independent on Sunday broke the news of Sir Mark’s BIEE talk to Scotland Yard last week, a spokesman noted the details but declined to comment.

British police launched an inquiry in January after documents discovered during the Libyan uprising suggested that Sir Mark had conspired in the rendition. The allegations were so serious that the police and Director of Public Prosecutions issued a statement saying: “It is in the public interest for them to be investigated now.”

In one of the documents, a letter sent to Gaddafi’s head of intelligence, Moussa Koussa, in March 2004, Sir Mark states that helping get Mr Belhadj to Libya “was the least we could do for you and for Libya to demonstrate the remarkable relationship we have built over recent years”. Sir Mark added: “I was grateful to you for helping the officer we sent out last week.”

Peter Bouckaert, emergencies director of Human Rights Watch, said: “A man with many secrets has a lot of favours he can call in. I hope he recovers soon enough to reveal some light on a very sordid page of British history. It is time to end the secrecy around Britain’s relationship with Gaddafi, and both the British and the Libyan public deserve some answers.”

Sir Mark is also facing a court battle as a result of a civil legal action that has been brought against him and the former foreign secretary Jack Straw, relating to the rendition and torture allegations. They are cited as key defendants in recently filed court documents that outline the abuse suffered by the two Libyan dissidents after they had been abducted and handed to Gaddafi’s regime with the help of British intelligence.

…

Jonathan Owen
Sunday, 21 October 2012

Find this story at 21 October 2012

© independent.co.uk

 

 

NEW REPORT DOCUMENTS ‘TOTAL POLICING’ CLAMPDOWN ON FREEDOM TO PROTEST

A detailed new report launched today by the Network for Police Monitoring (Netpol) highlights how promises made by the police to ‘adapt to protest’ after 2009′s G20 demonstrations in London have been forgotten in a remarkably short space of time and a far more intolerant ‘total policing’ style response to protesters has developed in the UK.

The report, which covers a fourteen month period from late 2010 to the end of 2011, paints a bleak picture of the state of the freedom to protest in the UK. It documents how the tactic of containment known as ‘kettling’, the use of solid steel barriers to restrict the movement of protesters, the intrusive and excessive use of stop & search and data gathering, and the pre-emptive arrests of people who have committed no crime, have combined to enable an effective clamp-down on almost all forms of popular street-level dissent.

The High Court last week ruled that the use of pre-emptive arrests in advance of the royal wedding in 2011 was lawful but, from the experiences of activists gathered by NetPol, the report argues that this tactic is ‘one of the most disturbing aspects of the policing of protest’. Squats and protest sites were raided by police and potential protesters were rounded up and arrested. This including ten people who were carrying republican placards and a group who had dressed up to attend a ‘zombie wedding’, who were arrested while sitting in a café drinking coffee.

The report is also critical of the use of ‘section 60’ stop and searches, which require no ‘reasonable suspicion’ and have been disproportionately targeted at young people taking part in protests. This group has also faced arrest for ‘wearing dark clothing’, for ‘looking like an anarchist’, and in some cases under eighteen year olds have been threatened with being taken into ‘police protection’ if they participated in demonstrations.

NetPol’s research also highlights the invasive but routine use of police data gathering tactics, which oblige protesters to stand and pose in front of police camera teams and to provide their personal details. The report gives evidence of an increasing misuse of anti-social behaviour legislation to force protesters to provide a name and address under threat of arrest. NetPol believes political protest should not be equated with anti-social behaviour, and that the use of such powers against demonstrators should end.

Each one of these measures restricts and deters legitimate protest, but taken together these measures allow the police to impose a level of deterrence, intimidation and control that makes taking part in legitimate protest a daunting and often frightening experience.

Val Swain, commenting on the report’s launch on behalf of NetPol,said:

“The evidence we have gathered has been published just as news emerges of further pre-emptive arrests and other restrictions on the freedom to protest taking place in advance of this summer’s London Olympics. With an apparent willingness by the courts to defend any actions by the police against protesters, we fear that dissenting voices face an even harsher clamp-down in the weeks to come.”

Find this story at 24 July 2012

Find the report at

 

Police protest tactics ‘give officers excessive and disproportionate control’

Study by network of police monitoring groups says use of pre-emptive arrests and kettling are unjustified curbs on liberty

Police tactics, such as the kettling used to quell the 2009 G20 protests in London, have been condemned by Netpol. Photograph: Antonio Olmos

Pre-emptive arrests, confinement by kettling and the gathering of personal data give police officers “excessive and disproportionate” control over public protests, a report by a coalition of police monitoring groups has warned.

The study by the Network for Police Monitoring (Netpol) is highly critical of tactics used by forces across the country to clamp down on what it says are freedoms of assembly and expression.

Based on evidence from court cases and eyewitness reports of police operations in 2010 and 2011, the study calls for a more tolerant approach towards processions and protests.

Netpol consists of an alliance of well-established activist groups, including Aldermaston Women’s Peace Camp, the Campaign Against Criminalising Communities, Climate Camp Legal Team, FITwatch, Green & Black Cross, Legal Defence and Monitoring Group and the Newham Monitoring Project.

“The use of pre-emptive arrests is one of the most disturbing aspects of the policing of protest during [this] period,” the report states. “The mere possibility of disruption to the royal wedding triggered the arrest of groups of prospective protesters who had committed no criminal acts.

“Ten people holding placards were arrested while heading to a republican party, and a group of people dressed up to attend a ‘zombie wedding’ were apprehended while drinking coffee in Starbucks.”

Intrusive levels of stop and search were used during an anti-austerity demonstration of 30 June 2011, where people were also “pre-emptively arrested for wearing black and looking like an anarchist,” the study says.

The high court, however, recently ruled that the use of pre-emptive arrests in advance of the royal wedding in 2011 was lawful. The European court of human rights in Strasbourg has also dismissed appeals by campaigners who have attempted to have kettling – refusing to allow protesters to disperse – outlawed.

The Netpol report disagrees with the court decisions, maintaining that holding people “for long periods of time within police kettles has placed vulnerable individuals at risk, prevented people from moving away from scenes of violence and disorder … and constitutes an unnecessary and unjustified interference with individual liberty”.

It adds: “People attempting a spontaneous march from a UKUncut demonstration were held for up to two hours on Lambeth Bridge, in a situation which in no way presented a risk of harm.

“Student protesters in Manchester were similarly kettled for taking part in a demonstration which, while disobedient, was not violent.

“The imposition of a kettle in Whitehall on the 24 December student demonstration appeared to be a catalyst of disorder, and serious injuries occurred in Parliament Square on the 10 December despite the use of kettling.”

…

Owen Bowcott, legal affairs correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 24 July 2012 17.46 BST

Find this story at 24 July 2012
© 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

Police Taser blind man mistaking his white stick for a samurai sword

The IPCC is investigating an incident in Chorley, where an innocent person was struck by a 50,000-volt stun gun

An innocent blind man was shot in the back with a 50,000-volt Taser by police after they mistook his white stick for a samurai sword.

Colin Farmer, 61, was hit after reports of a man walking through Chorley, Lancashire, early on Friday evening, with a sword. He said he initially thought he was being attacked by hooligans when he was struck by the Taser.

The matter is being investigated by the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) after Farmer made a complaint to the force.

Farmer, who used to run an architects’ practice, was on his way to meet friends at 5.45pm and was walking in Peter Street near a restaurant. “I was just walking along and I heard some men shouting really angrily and thought I’m going to get mugged. I didn’t know any police were here.

“The Taser hit me in the back and it started sending all these thousands of volts through me and I was terrified. I mean I had two strokes already caused by stress. I dropped the stick involuntarily and I collapsed on the floor face down.”

He added: “I was shaking and I thought ‘I’m going to have another stroke any second and this one is going to kill me. I’m being killed. I’m being killed’.”

Farmer, who has suffered two strokes, the most recent requiring two months in hospital in March, was fearful he would suffer another stroke.

“I walk at a snail’s pace. They could have walked past me, driven past me in a van or said ‘drop your weapon’.”

Lancashire Police apologised to Farmer for the “traumatic experience” but confirmed last night that the officer who fired the Taser has not been suspended and remains on duty.

Chief superintendent Stuart Williams, from Lancashire Police, said: “We received a number of reports that a man was walking through Chorley with a Samurai sword and patrols were sent to look for him.

“One of the officers believed he had located the offender. Despite asking the man to stop, he failed to do so and the officer discharged his Taser.

“It then became apparent this man was not the person we were looking for and officers attended to him straight away.

“He was taken to Chorley Hospital by officers who stayed while he was checked over by medics. They then took him to meet his friends in Chorley at his request.

…

Helen Carter
The Guardian, Thursday 18 October 2012

Find this story at 18 October 2012

© 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

Marines charged with murder over Afghanistan death

Five Royal Marines charged with murder over the death of an insurgent in Afghanistan in 2011

British soldiers in Helmand: the incident took place last year but it is thought investigators only began inquiries in recent weeks. Photograph: Corporal Barry Lloyd Rlc/AFP

Five Royal Marines have been charged with murder over the death of an insurgent in Afghanistan in 2011.

Seven marines were arrested on Thursday by the Royal Military police. Two more were later arrested, one on Friday and one on Saturday. Four have been released without charge pending further inquiries, according to the Ministry of Defence.

The incident took place in Helmand province last year, but it is thought investigators only began an inquiry in recent weeks.

An MoD spokesman said: “The Royal Military police has referred the cases of the remaining five Royal Marines to the independent Service Prosecuting Authority.

“Following direction from the SPA these marines have now been charged with murder and they remain in custody pending court proceedings.”

The soldiers, believed to be members of 3 Commando Brigade, were arrested in connection with an incident described as “an engagement with an insurgent” in which no civilians were involved.

During a six-month tour of duty in 2010, which lasted from April to October, seven servicemen from the brigade were killed in action, all from 42 Commando. The tour, Operation Herrick 14, was the unit’s fourth and saw the force score notable successes in capturing explosives from the Taliban.

…

Jonathan Haynes and agencies
The Guardian, Sunday 14 October 2012 08.34 BST

Find this story at 14 October 2012

© 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

UDA: Murdered chief was spy

Murdered loyalist Alan McCullough was a military intelligence spy who double-crossed both factions of a feuding terror organisation, his killers claimed.

As detectives continued to question a man about the murder, the Ulster Defence Association also accused McCullough of being heavily involved in four assassinations.

The paramilitary grouping provoked a wave of revulsion for killing McCullough, a former ally of ousted loyalist Johnny Adair, after apparently agreeing to lift a death sentence against him.

The 21-year-old fled to England after the UDA drove supporters of Adair’s ruthless C Company unit out of Northern Ireland at the height of the internecine war.

But in a statement issued the UDA claimed it wanted to set the record straight “once and for all”.

It said: “Alan McCullough was an MI5 agent who “Judased” both the UDA and his murdering mates in C Company who were exiled from Northern Ireland.

“McCullough was military commander of the notorious, now defunct, C Company who gave the orders for four murders, numerous gun and bomb attacks and death threats throughout Northern Ireland.”

A brutal power-struggle between Adair and his rival UDA commanders saw four men shot dead either side of the New Year.

Among those killed were the organisation’s hardline South-East Antrim brigadier John “Grug” Gregg and his associate Robert Carson near Belfast docks.

…

Find this story at 15 October 2012

Part of the Daily Mail, The Mail on Sunday & Metro Media Group
© Associated Newspapers Ltd

Northern Ireland loyalist shootings: one night of carnage, 18 years of silence

 

In 1994 six men were shot dead in a bar at Loughinisland – but no one was charged. Ian Cobain follows the supply of arms used in the massacre and investigates allegations of state collusion

Aidan O’Toole, a survivor of the Loyalist attack on the Heights Bar in Loughinisland, County Down, in 1994, and Emma Rogan, daughter of one of the six dead, in the room as it is today. Photograph: Paul McErlane for the Guardian

Shortly after 10pm on 18 June 1994, Ireland were 1-0 up against Italy in the opening match of the 1994 World Cup. at the Giants Stadium in New Jersey. The second half had just kicked off, and inside the Heights Bar at Loughinisland, 21 miles south of Belfast, all eyes were on the television. The bar is tiny: there were 15 men inside, and it was packed.

Aidan O’Toole, the owner’s 23-year-old son, was serving. “I heard the door open and then I just heard crack, crack, crack and felt a stabbing pain inside me,” he recalls. “I just ran. It was instinctive. I didn’t know what was happening but I knew I had to get away.”

Others inside the bar turned when the door opened and saw two men in boiler suits, their faces hidden by balaclavas. One of the intruders dropped to one knee and fired three bursts from an automatic rifle. Barney Green was sitting with his back to the door, close enough for the gunmen to reach out and tap his shoulder had they wished. He took the first blast, with around nine rounds passing through him before striking other men. Green, a retired farmer, was 87.

Green’s nephew, Dan McCreanor, 59, another farmer, died alongside him. A second burst killed Malcolm Jenkinson, 53, who was at the bar, and Adrian Rogan, 34, who was trying to escape to the lavatory. A third burst aimed at a table to the right of the door missed Willie O’Hare but killed his son-in-law, Eamon Byrne, 39. O’Hare’s son Patsy, 35, was also shot and died en route to hospital. Five men were injured: one, who lost part of a foot, would spend nine months in hospital.

O’Toole returned to the bar from a back room after hearing the killers’ car screech away. A bullet was lodged in his left kidney and a haze of gun smoke filled the room. But he could see clearly enough. “There were bodies piled on top of each other. It was like a dream; a nightmare.”

Most of the victims had been hit several times. Thirty rounds were fired, and some had passed through one man, ricocheted around the tiny room, then struck a second. Adrian Rogan’s father pushed his way into the bar and whispered a short prayer in his son’s ear, knowing he was not going to survive.

Loughinisland had been scarcely touched by the Troubles. A village of 600 or so people, where Catholics and Protestants had lived side by side for generations, none of its sons or daughters had been killed or hurt before, and none had been accused of terrorist offences. It is not a republican area – many of its Catholic inhabitants were so uninterested in politics that they did not vote even for the nationalist Social Democratic and Labour party (SDLP) – and Protestants often drank at the Heights. Only by chance were no Protestants killed or wounded that night.

Ninety minutes after the attack, a loyalist paramilitary group, the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), telephoned a radio station to claim responsibility.

Police promises

Despite years of death and destruction in Northern Ireland, people around the world were shocked by the slaughter at the Heights. The Queen, Pope John Paul II and Bill Clinton sent messages of sympathy. Local Protestant families visited their injured and traumatised neighbours in hospital, expressing shock and disgust.

The police told the victims’ families they would leave no stone unturned in their efforts to catch the killers and bring them to justice.

The morning after the killings, the gunmen’s getaway car, a red Triumph Acclaim, was found abandoned in a field seven miles from Loughinisland. The farmer who spotted it called the police at 10.04am. The recovery of such a vehicle was quite rare during the Troubles – paramilitaries often torched them to destroy forensic evidence – and police were soon at the scene to take possession. There was no forensic examination of the area around the car, however.

A few weeks later, workmen found a holdall under a bridge a couple of miles from where the car had been found. Inside were three boiler suits, three balaclavas, three pairs of surgical gloves, three handguns, ammunition and a magazine. Not far from the bridge, police found a Czech-made VZ-58 assault rifle, which scientists confirmed was the weapon used to kill the men at the Heights.

The same weapon had been used the previous October in a UVF attack on a van carrying Catholic painters to work at Shorts aircraft and missile factory in Belfast, in which one man died and five others were wounded.

In the months that followed the Loughinisland shootings, nine people were arrested and questioned. All nine were released without charge. A 10th was arrested and released the following year, and two more suspects were arrested for questioning a year after that, all released without charge. The police repeatedly assured the families that no stone would be left unturned.

Emma Rogan was eight years old when her father, Adrian, was killed at the Heights. “I was told that these bad men came into the bar, and that my daddy was dead. I didn’t really know what they meant.”

As she grew up, she had no reason to doubt the police when they said they were doing everything in their power to catch the killers. “We didn’t question the police: that’s what this area is like. If they said they would leave no stone unturned, you took that at face value.”

By the time the 10th anniversary of the killings came around, Rogan was anxious to learn more about her father’s death, and hear of any progress the police had made. A series of meetings was organised between senior investigators of the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the victims’ relatives, and later more information emerged when the police ombudsman for Northern Ireland published a report in 2011 on the investigation. Relatives of the dead men came to the conclusion, as Rogan puts it, that “they had treated us like mushrooms, keeping us in the dark for years and feeding us whatnot”.
A memorial plaque in the room where six men were murdered in a 1994 Loyalist attack on the Heights Bar in Loughinisland, County Down, Northern Ireland. Photograph: Paul McErlane for the Guardian

The getaway car had passed through four owners in the eight weeks before it was used in the shooting, changing hands so quickly that the first person in the chain remained the registered owner. The morning after the killings, a Belfast police officer was asked to call at this person’s home. The officer did so, but found the man was out. The officer then recorded the time of his visit as 9.30am – 34 minutes before the farmer had rung police to tell them he had discovered the car.

Some time between 11am and noon, a second police officer – a detective with no connection to the murder inquiry – telephoned the second person in the ownership chain, and asked him to come to the local police station to give a statement. How this detective came to know that the car had passed through this man’s hands is unclear. What is known, however, is that a statement was given, and that a note was attached to it, saying that the individual who gave it could be contacted only through the detective who took it.

The Loughinisland families argue this amounts to evidence that the person who gave this statement – one of the people involved in supplying the car used by the killers – was a police informer.

The Guardian has interviewed this man. He is Terry Fairfield, and today he runs a pub in the south of England. Fairfield confirms that he was a member of the UVF at the time, but denies he was a police informer. He says he did subsequently receive several thousand pounds from the detective, for helping him take a firearm and some explosives out of circulation. He accepts that being invited to attend a police station, rather than being arrested, was highly unorthodox. The detective says he had known Fairfield for years and contacted him after hearing of the Loughinisland shooting, but that only members of the murder inquiry could decide whether to arrest him.

A second man, who is widely suspected locally of having been in the getaway car, and who is also alleged to have been an informer, has also told the Guardian that he has never been arrested.

The families also question the failure to take samples from some of the people arrested for questioning. The Guardian understands that at least five of the men arrested in the months after the shootings were not fingerprinted before being released without charge. No DNA swabs were taken from either of the two people arrested in 1996.

One man, Gorman McMullan, who has been named as a suspect in a Northern Ireland newspaper, was arrested the month after the shootings and released without charge. He was one of the people who were released without being fingerprinted and no DNA swab was taken. McMullan firmly denies that he has ever been to Loughinisland or that he was ever in the getaway car, and no further action was taken against him in connection with the shootings. He acknowledges however that he was “involved in the conflict”.

The police admitted to the families at one of their meetings that they had handed the getaway car to a scrap metal firm to be crushed and baled. They said this had been done because the vehicle was taking up too much space in a police station yard. That decision means it can never again be tested for comparison with samples taken from any new suspects.

Families’ disbelief

Emma Rogan and Aidan O’Toole cannot believe that the destruction of the car or other failings in the investigation were an accident. They believe that this is evidence of police collusion. “They knew exactly what they were doing,” Rogan says.

The families lodged a complaint with the police ombudsman for Northern Ireland. When the ombudsman, Al Hutchinson, published his report, it contained mild criticism of an investigation that displayed “a lack of cohesive and focused effort”. To the anger of the families, it refused to state whether or not police informants were suspected of involvement and appeared to gloss over the forensic failures. It concluded that the destruction of the car was “inappropriate”, rather than evidence of corruption or collusion.

The report was widely condemned in Northern Ireland. Hutchinson agreed to leave his post, and his successor is now reviewing the report. There will be no examination of the arms shipment, however, as the ombudsman’s remit extends only to the police, not the army.

Much of the suspicion about British involvement in the 1987 arms shipment revolves around Brian Nelson, a former soldier who joined the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) in the early 70s. In 1985, Nelson offered himself as an informant to the Force Research Unit (FRU), a covert unit within the army’s intelligence corps that recruited and ran agents in Northern Ireland. He quit the UDA the following year and moved to Germany with his wife and children. The FRU, operating with the approval of MI5, approached Nelson in Germany and persuaded him to return to Belfast to rejoin the UDA as an army agent.

For the next three years, Nelson was paid £200 a week by the government while operating as the UDA’s intelligence officer, helping to select targets for assassination. He informed his army handlers in advance of attacks: only two were halted, while at least three people were killed and attempts were made on the lives of at least eight more.

A detailed account of this extraordinary operation appears in a report on the loyalist killing of the Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane that Peter Cory, a retired Canadian supreme court judge, prepared at the request of the government in 2004. An FRU report from July 1985 discloses that the army paid Nelson’s travel expenses when he travelled to Durban in South Africa that year to make initial contact with an arms dealer. “The [British] army appears to have at least encouraged Nelson in his attempt to purchase arms in South Africa for the UDA,” Cory concludes. “Nelson certainly went to South Africa in 1985 to meet an arms dealer. His expenses were paid by FRU. The army appears to have been committed to facilitating Nelson’s acquisition of weapons, with the intention that they would be intercepted at some point en route to Northern Ireland.”

Nelson is said to have told the FRU that the UDA possessed insufficient funds at that time to purchase any arms. “The evidence with regard to the completion of the arms transaction is frail and contradictory,” Cory says. As a result, “whether the transaction was consummated remains an open question”.

In July 1987, the funds to purchase a large consignment of weapons were secured with the robbery of more than £325,000 from a branch of Northern Bank in Portadown, 30 miles south-west of Belfast. The proceeds of the robbery were to be used to purchase weapons that were to be split three ways between the UDA, the UVF and Ulster Resistance (UR), a paramilitary organisation set up by unionists in response to the 1985 Anglo-Irish agreement.

What happened next is described by a former senior employee with South Africa’s Armscor, a man who was intimately involved in the plot to smuggle the weapons into Northern Ireland. According to this source, officials in South Africa introduced a senior figure within UR to one of the corporation’s representatives in Europe, an American arms dealer called Douglas Bernhardt.

In October 1987, Bernhardt is said to have flown to Gatwick airport for a face-to-face meeting with a senior UDA commander, John McMichael, after which couriers carried money from the bank raid, in cash, to Bernhardt’s office in Geneva.

Bernhardt was not told where the money had come from, according to the Armscor source. “When you get that sort of dirty banknote, you don’t ask,” the source says. Bernhardt obtained a bank draft which was then sent to an arms dealer in Beirut, who had obtained the weapons from a Lebanese militia.

As the operation progressed, according to the Armscor source, Bernhardt would regularly call his UR contact at his place of work. This man would then call back from a payphone, and they would talk in a simple code, referring to the weapons as “the parcel of fruit”. At each stage, Bernhardt is said to have been told that the arrangements needed to be agreed by McMichael and by his intelligence officer – Brian Nelson. “Everything had to be run by the head of intelligence.”

Bernhardt is said then to have travelled by ship to Beirut, where arrangements were made to pack the weapons into a shipping container labelled as a consignment of ceramic floor tiles. Bills of lading and a certificate of origin were organised, and the weapons were shipped to Belfast docks via Liverpool.

“There were at least a couple of hundred Czech-made AKs – the VZ-58,” the Armscor source recalls. “And 90-plus Browning-type handguns: Hungarian-made P9Ms. About 30,000 rounds of 7.62 x 39mm ammunition, not the 51mm Nato rounds. Plus a dozen or so RPGs, and a few hundred fragmentation grenades.”

Sources within both the police and the UVF have confirmed that one of the VZ-58s was used at Loughinisland.

According to the Armscor source, the UR member who dealt with Bernhardt was Noel Little, a civil servant and former British soldier. Now in his mid-60s and living quietly in an affluent Belfast suburb, Little denies this. “My position is that I wasn’t involved,” Little says. But he adds: “I would deny it even if I was.”

Little confirms, however, that he was a founder member of UR, and a central figure within the organisation at the time that the weapons arrived in Belfast. He also appears to possess detailed knowledge of the way in which the arms were smuggled and distributed.

The weapons arrived in Belfast in December 1987, a few days before McMichael was killed by an IRA car bomb. Early in the new year, they were split three ways at a farmhouse in County Armagh. The UDA lost its entire slice of the pie within minutes: its share of about 100 weapons was loaded into the boot of two hire cars that were stopped a few minutes later at a police roadblock near Portadown. The three occupants were later jailed, with their leader, Davy Payne, receiving a 19-year sentence.

The following month, police recovered around half the UVF’s weapons after a tip-off led them to an outhouse on the outskirts of north Belfast. Fairfield says he recalls being shown what remained of the UVF’s new arsenal, in storage at a house in the city that was being renovated. “I made the mistake of touching one,” he says, adding that this could result in him being linked to the October 1993 killing outside the Shorts factory.

Little was also arrested, after his telephone number was found written on the back of Payne’s hand. “John McMichael had given it to him, in case he got into any trouble in Armagh,” Little says. “I lost three-quarters of a stone [4.75kg] during the seven days I was questioned. The police put me under extreme psychological pressure.” Eventually, he was released without charge.

Little says that while UR redistributed a few of its weapons – “there were some deals around the edges” – most of its consignment was kept intact.

“They were never used. They were for the eventuality of the British just walking away – doing an Algeria – after the Anglo-Irish agreement was signed.” As far as he is aware, the consignment has never been decommissioned.

Dramatic arrest

The following year saw Little arrested again, this time in France, in dramatic fashion. He had travelled to Paris with two fellow loyalists, James King and Samuel Quinn, to meet Bernhardt and a South African intelligence officer operating under the name Daniel Storm. Officers of the French security agency, Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST), seized the three Ulstermen and the South African in a raid on a room at the Hilton International, at the same moment that Bernhardt was being grabbed in the foyer of the Hôtel George-V, and lifted bodily, according to one witness, out of the building and into a waiting car.

The five had been caught red-handed attempting to trade stolen parts from the sighting system of a ground-to-air missile that was under development at the Shorts factory. The apartheid regime wanted to use the parts in the development of its own missile for use in Angola, where its ground forces were vulnerable to attack by Cuban-piloted MiGs. “This deal was about speed,” says the Armscor source. “If you’ve got Cuban-piloted jets whacking your troops in border wars, you don’t have the luxury of saying: ‘We’ll have a research programme over time.’ You’ve got to speed up the R&D.”

Storm was set free after claiming diplomatic immunity, while the others were interrogated in the basement of the DST’s headquarters in the 15th arrondissement. “I was slapped about a little,” says Little. “But not too much.” The DST told Bernhardt it had listened in on a meeting the previous night, through a bug in the chandelier of the room at the George-V where the men had gathered. “They knew all about the fruit code used in 1987,” the Armscor source says. “They thought the talk about pineapples was a huge joke. They must have been monitoring the phone calls. And they knew all about Lebanon.

“My guess is that the British were intercepting those phone calls. But the British didn’t get all the weapons. How much did they know in advance? Why didn’t they move more quickly? Maybe they were perfectly happy to have that material … sort of ‘arrive’, and put into the hands of the loyalists. Christ knows, the IRA had had enough of their own shipments, everywhere from Boston to Tripoli.”

Noel Little also suspects the British turned a blind eye to the 1987 arms shipment. “It is a theory I can’t discount,” he says. “Brian Nelson was inserted into the UDA as an agent, he wasn’t a recruited member. Ho w could he know about it and not tell his handler?”

Little believes that his attempt to hand over stolen missile technology to Armscor in Paris – straying into “secrets and commerce”, as he puts it – would have been a step too far for the British authorities, obliging them to tip off the French.

After eight months on remand, the four men were brought to court charged with arms trafficking, handling stolen goods and terrorism-related conspiracy. Bernhardt told the court that he had helped arrange the Lebanese arms deal for loyalist paramilitaries in 1987. The four were sentenced to time served and fined between 20,000 and 100,000 francs (£2,000-£10,000 then).

Brian Nelson was finally arrested in January 1990 after John Stevens, then deputy chief constable of Cambridgeshire, had been brought in to investigate collusion between the security forces and loyalist paramilitaries in Northern Ireland. While awaiting trial, Nelson wrote a journal in which he recounted his time as an army agent inside the UDA. “I was bitten by a bug … hooked is probably a more appropriate word. One becomes enmeshed in a web of intrigue, conspiracies, confidences, dangers …”

After flying to Durban in 1985, he wrote, his South African contacts had asked whether he would be able to obtain a missile from Shorts. Two years later, while talking about the South African connection with “Ronnie”, his FRU handler, he had been told that “because of the deep suspicion a seizure would have aroused, to protect me it had been decided to let the first shipment into the country untouched”. Nelson added that “Ronnie” assured him that the arms consignment would be under surveillance.

In 1993, an intelligence source told the BBC that this had happened: the consignment had indeed been under surveillance by a number of agencies, but the wrong port was watched, with the result that the weapons slipped through.At Nelson’s eventual court appearance, a plea deal resulted in Nelson being jailed for 10 years after he admitted 20 offences, including conspiracy to murder. Murder charges were dropped. More than 40 other people were also convicted of terrorism offences as a result of the Stevens investigation. They did not include any of the intelligence officers for whom Nelson worked.

Stevens’ investigation team was well aware of concerns surrounding the importation of the weapons. Members of the team talked to former Armscor officials in South Africa, but concluded that an investigation into the matter was so unlikely to produce any results as to be fruitless. However, a senior member of the inquiry team says he believes it feasible that the UK authorities could have been involved in bringing the weapons into Belfast – or at least turned a blind eye. “It’s not at all far-fetched,” he says.

By the time of the Loughinisland massacre, loyalist gunmen with access to the Armscor arsenal were killing at least as many people as the IRA. Czech-made VZ-58 assault rifles were used in many of the killings. A few weeks after the shootings at the Heights Bar, the IRA announced a ceasefire.

Many in Northern Ireland are convinced that the importation of the Armscor weapons, and the large numbers of killings that followed, contributed greatly to the IRA’s decision. Among them is Noel Little, who says: “There’s no doubt that that shipment did change things.”

Increasingly, the IRA was forced to defend itself against attacks by loyalists, it was diverted into targeting loyalist paramilitaries rather than police officers or soldiers, and it came under pressure from nationalists as more and more Catholic people were slaughtered. To Little’s way of thinking, the Armscor weapons “tipped the balance against the IRA and eventually forced them to sue for peace”. And while he accepts – and says he deplores – the slaughter of innocent people at Loughinisland and elsewhere, he adds: “Innocent bystanders are killed in every war.”

Six weeks after the IRA’s announcement, loyalist paramilitaries announced their own ceasefire.

With the Loughinisland families no nearer to discovering the truth about the deaths of their loved ones following publication of the ombudsman’s report, they embarked on their civil actions against the Ministry of Defence and the police in January this year. A letter of claim sent to the MoD says the claim is based in part on “the army’s knowledge of and facilitation of the shipment”, while one sent to the Police Service of Northern Ireland says the claim arises from a series of failings, including “closing off investigative opportunities” and “the destruction of vital evidence”.

…

Ian Cobain
The Guardian, Monday 15 October 2012 18.08 BST

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© 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

UK accused of helping to supply arms for Northern Ireland loyalist killings

Relatives of Catholics killed in 1994 claim compensation, alleging security service complicity in arming UDA

The bloodstained interior of the Heights Bar at Loughinisland, the morning after six Catholic men had been killed and five others injured in a loyalist gun attack. Photograph: Pacemaker

Allegations that the government helped to arm loyalist gangs with a large arsenal of weapons at the height of Northern Ireland’s Troubles are to surface in court proceedings arising from one of the most notorious massacres of the 30-year conflict.

The Ministry of Defence and the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) are being sued by relatives of six men murdered by a loyalist gunman who opened fire inside a bar crowded with people watching football on television in Loughinisland, County Down, in June 1994. While the families are claiming compensation, they say their aim is to uncover the truth about the killings.

The authorities are alleged to have assisted – or at least turned a blind eye – as about 300 automatic rifles and pistols, hundreds of grenades and an estimated 30,000 rounds of ammunition were smuggled into Belfast in 1987. One of the rifles, a Czech-made VZ-58 assault rifle, was used in the attack in the village.

According to a number of those involved in the shipment, the weapons were provided by Armscor, the arms sales and procurement corporation of apartheid-era South Africa. A deal was struck between Armscor and leading loyalists after a British agent, who infiltrated the paramilitary Ulster Defence Association (UDA) for the army and MI5, visited South Africa in 1985.

The agent was shopping for arms for the UDA. But the MoD has conceded that the trip was funded by the taxpayer, with an army intelligence unit paying his expenses.

There is no conclusive proof that the agent’s South Africa trip led directly to the arsenal being smuggled into Belfast two years later. But Niall Murphy, lawyer for the families, said: “We are confident that evidence of British involvement does exist, and we look forward to applying to the high court for its disclosure.”

A number of people in South Africa and Belfast who were involved in the talks after the agent’s visit told the Guardian they believe the government must have been aware that an arms deal was being arranged, and took no action to prevent the weapons from being smuggled into Northern Ireland, where they were divided between three paramilitary groups.

Within weeks of the consignment arriving in Northern Ireland, loyalist gunman Michael Stone was hurling several of the grenades and firing one of the pistols in an attack that claimed the lives of three people at the funeral of three IRA members at Milltown cemetery in west Belfast. From then on, the number of killings by loyalists rose sharply: during the six years before the weapons were landed, loyalists had killed about 70 people; in the six years that followed, they killed about 230.

Many of the victims were Catholics who had no involvement with the conflict, and as the death toll mounted the IRA came under increasing pressure to call a ceasefire.

There is reason to believe that a number of the paramilitaries connected to the attack were police informers.

There are serious concerns about the way the Loughinisland killings were investigated, with a subsequent inquiry by the police ombudsman establishing that police failed to take some suspects’ fingerprints or DNA samples. Police have admitted that one key piece of evidence – the getaway car – was destroyed. There is no evidence that any officer sought or gave permission for this to be done.

The families of the dead men are also bringing civil proceedings against the PSNI after the police ombudsman in Belfast examined the initial investigation and then produced a report which was widely criticised for refusing to acknowledge whether police informers were involved in the massacre. Murphy said: “The experience of these six families demonstrates that the current mechanisms for truth recovery do not work.”

…

Ian Cobain
The Guardian, Monday 15 October 2012 18.06 BST

Find this story at 15 October 2012

© 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

MoD lobbying claims: the key figures

Top brass are said to have boasted of access to ministers, sparking a crackdown on lobbying at the Ministry of Defence

General Lord Richard Dannatt, the former head of the army

The Sunday Times claimed Dannatt had offered to help two executives from a South Korean defence company who wanted to sell the UK military a hi-tech drone. Dannatt offered to speak to Bernard Gray, the civilian chief of defence materiel. He was quoted as saying he had engineered a seat at a formal dinner with the Ministry of Defence’s new permanent secretary, Jon Thompson, to help another company, Capital Symonds, which is bidding for a £400m contract to manage the MoD’s estates. The two men were school friends, he said.

In a lengthy rebuttal, Dannatt said he had made it clear to the undercover reporters that “I would need to meet the manufacturer and verify for myself whether the product was viable. I also told them that I was not particularly up-to-date with defence procurement matters and in particular had no idea whether the MoD had already contracted to acquire such a mini UAV.” He admitted that an “indirect approach” to senior people such as General Sir David Richards, chief of the defence staff, Gray and Thompson might be helpful. With regard to Capital Symonds, Dannatt said he had “no contract with them, have received no payment or benefit from them, hold no shares in the company and am not a director”.

He said he had “never been asked to lobby and have no intention of lobbying” for them and said the Sunday Times had got confused about the conversation. The general said he had not lobbied in a way that contravened rules and would regard any such claim as “seriously defamatory”.

Lieutenant General Sir John Kiszely, president of the Royal British Legion

The Sunday Times claimed Kiszley boasted he knew the 10 currently serving generals that he regarded as worth talking to with regard to procurement. The paper said Kiszely described having a close relationship with the new armed forces minister, Andrew Robathan, who was going to stay with him over Christmas. Kiszely also said his ceremonial roles for the legion gave him access to Philip Hammond, the defence secretary, and Richards. One such occasion was the annual Festival of Remembrance, when he stands next to the prime minister. Confronted by the Sunday Times, Kiszley insisted he “always kept my role as national president of the Royal British Legion completely separate from my business interests”. The MoD said Robathan had not received an invitation to Kiszely’s at Christmas. “They have only met infrequently and he never raised the work of private clients,” the MoD said. The Royal British Legion said it intended to hold its own investigation into whether Kiszely had broken any rules.

Admiral Sir Trevor Soar

The commander in chief of the Royal Navy fleet until March this year, Soar told the undercover reporters he knew “all the ministers” at the MoD. As he has only recently retired, Soar is one of two former officers who could have flouted the guidelines set out by the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (ACOBA). This stipulates that you cannot lobby for two years after retiring. Soar is quoted as saying “theoretically we are banned from lobbying ministers … we call it something different”. Soar said he preferred the term consultant. He has since said all his private jobs had been given official approval and that he is only motivated by wanting to bring “battle-winning equipment to the navy”. He denied breaking rules.

Lieutenant General Sir Richard Applegate

The Sunday Times claimed the former head of army procurement boasted about having spent the past 18 months working on behalf of an Israeli arms firm and had successfully lobbied the MoD to release £500m for a helicopter safety programme. If true, he could be in breach of the ACOBA rules – because the activity would have taken place within two years of him leaving service. But, approached by the paper, he denied breaking any rules and said: “At no stage did I lobby or agree to a covert political lobbying campaign.”

Lord Stirrup, the air chief marshal and former chief of the defence staff

Stirrup made clear he had never lobbied the government for private clients, but told the undercover reporters the defence minister in the Lords was “a friend” and that he also knew the minister for the armed forces and other serving senior members of the military.

Speaking on Sky news, Stirrup said: “I was asked about my contacts. If you’re pressed about them then of course you say what they are. I was asked about whether I know ministers – and I do. What I also said, which was not reported, was that approaching ministers is not the way to do it … you need to understand the military’s requirements, and they’re not set by ministers.”

General Sir Mike Jackson

…

guardian.co.uk, Sunday 14 October 2012 19.13 BST

Find this story at 14 October 2012
© 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

Arms firms call up ‘generals for hire’

TOP-RANKING retired military officers have been secretly filmed boasting about lobbying to win multi-million-pound defence deals for arms firms in breach of official rules.

The “generals for hire” can be exposed after a Sunday Times investigation recorded them offering their contacts with ministers and former colleagues for six-figure sums.

During a three-month investigation into the revolving door between the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and private arms companies:

■ Lieutenant-General Sir John Kiszely, a Falklands war hero and former head of the Defence Academy, confided that he could use his role as president of the Royal British Legion to push his clients’ agenda with the prime minister and other senior figures at Remembrance Day events. He also bragged about lobbying on a multimillion-pound contract that was in official “purdah”.

■ Lieutenant-General Richard Applegate, a former MoD procurement chief, described a secret and successful lobbying campaign in parliament for a £500m military programme on

Insight Published: 14 October 2012

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© Times Newspapers Ltd 2012

MoD staff and thousands of military officers join arms firms

Guardian research in the aftermath of the ‘jobs for generals’ scandal shows extent of links between MoD and private sector

Lt General Sir John Kiszely, who has resigned as president of the Royal British Legion, was one of several former senior members of the military caught in a lobbying sting. Photograph: Fiona Hanson/Press Association

Senior military officers and Ministry of Defence officials have taken up more than 3,500 jobs in arms companies over the past 16 years, according to figures that reveal the extent of the “revolving door” between the public and private sector.

The data, compiled by the Guardian from freedom of information requests, shows how the industry swoops on former officials and military personnel once they have left service, with hundreds of senior officers being given jobs every year.

The figures for 2011-12 show 231 jobs went to former officials and military personnel – a rise from the previous year’s total of 101. Another 93 have been approved since January. In total 3,572 jobs have been approved since 1996.

The disclosure comes in the aftermath of a “jobs for generals” scandal that led to the resignation of the president of the Royal British Legion, Lieutenant General Sir John Kiszely, who was embarrassed in a newspaper lobbying sting.

Kiszely was one of several former senior members of the military caught on film by Sunday Times reporters who were pretending to seek lobbyists for a South Korean defence company.

Boasting about his connections, Kiszely described the annual Festival of Remembrance as a “tremendous networking opportunity” and said he was spending Christmas with the armed forces minister, Andrew Robothan.

In his resignation letter, Kiszely admitted he had made “exaggerated and foolish claims”, but denied any impropriety.

Admiral Trevor Soar, second in command of the Royal Navy until the spring, has also quit his role as an advisor at the large UK defence and engineering company Babcock. The firm said Kiszely had been sacked from his role at the company, too.

The MoD began its own inquiry on Monday into the access that former members of the military have to serving officials. This may lead to a tightening of current restrictions and blanket bans on certain individuals approaching senior staff in the ministry.

Figures obtained by the Guardian relate to the number of jobs approved under business appointment rules for armed forces personnel and MoD civilians. They show that there has been a regular flow into the private sector every year since records began in 1996. There has never been fewer than 101 and the highest is 360.

Bernard Jenkin, the Conservative MP who chairs a Commons committee that oversees the rules governing the appointment of former military personnel and ministers, told the Guardian it was time the government legislated in this area to bring proper transparency and accountability.

Jenkin said the advisory committee on business appointments (Acoba), which scrutinises when the top brass can accept new jobs, was toothless because it could be ignored.

“The Acoba is merely advisory and it will not do,” he said. “There is no way that the present arrangements provide the reassurance to the public or protection to anyone that might be crossing from the public sector to the private sector.”

The furore began at the weekend with the Sunday Times investigation in which six former members of the military were approached for help by journalists purporting to be working for a defence firm.

Those fooled by the sting included Lord Dannatt, a former head of the army; Lieutenant General Richard Applegate, a former head of procurement at the MoD; and Lord Stirrup, a former chief of the defence staff.

All of those involved intimated they knew people at the top of the MoD who could help the firm. Some bragged about their connections to ministers and the MoD’s most senior civil servants.

Though they all denied wrongdoing, at least two of them appear to have been in breach of Acoba guidelines. These state that senior officers have to wait up to two years before they can lobby on behalf of defence companies. Soar, who retired this March, suggested he could ignore those guidelines if he was described as a consultant. Applegate, who has only just past the two years’ “purdah”, claimed he had spent the past 18 months working on behalf of an Israeli arms firm and had successfully lobbied the MoD to release £500m for a helicopter safety programme.

But even if the men have defied the Acoba rules, there is no way of sanctioning them or the firms with whom they might have been working.

Jenkin said the public administration select committee (Pasc) had flagged this problem to the government in July and had recommended adopting a much tougher regime.

“We recommended that there should be a statutory appointment of a conflict of interest and ethics commissioner, with statutory rules so that it is very clear what people can and cannot do. Acoba does not have any powers. This episode shows that and I hope the government will now look favourably on our proposals. They have yet to respond to them.”

A Cabinet Office spokesman said: “This is an important issue as events over the weekend have shown. We are currently considering issues in relation to business appointment rules as part of our response to the Pasc report published in July.”

Jim Murphy, the shadow defence secretary, said the system needed to be changed. “It is ludicrous that rules can be broken without sanction and so we must see systematic change to restore confidence and standards.

“Military expertise should not be lost after retirement, but contact on defence contracts must be transparent and within established guidelines. We must get to the bottom of what happened. We must also establish the facts of ministerial involvement and awareness in these cases.”

Labour has tabled a series of questions on the issue, including a demand for details of meetings between former members of the military and serving civil servants, senior officers and ministers.

Babcock announced that Kiszely and Soar had quit the company. They had both been recruited as advisers – the former to offer insight into the potential future needs of the military, the latter on exports. “The statements made by Sir John Kiszely, in the course of his attempt to win a job elsewhere, do not reflect his role for us,” the company said.

“The facts are that he was not recruited to perform any lobbying role; he has never been asked to perform such a role and indeed, irrespective of his comments, he has never performed any such role for this company. We have a very clear code of conduct for all of our employees, and these inaccurate comments clearly fall foul of our code. For this reason, Sir John will not continue to work with Babcock. Sir Trevor Soar has expressed regret over the embarrassment caused by his interview, and his resignation has been accepted by the company.”

…

Nick Hopkins, Rob Evans and Richard Norton-Taylor
The Guardian, Monday 15 October 2012 21.56 BST

Find this story at 15 October 2012

© 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

Mauritania extradites Gaddafi spy chief Senussi to Libya

Extradition of Libyan dictator’s former head of military intelligence could shed fresh light on 1988 Lockerbie bombing

Mauritania said on Wednesday that it had extradited Muammar Gaddafi’s infamous former spy chief, Abdullah al-Senussi, back to Libya, in a move that could shed fresh light on the 1988 Lockerbie bombing.

Government sources in Mauritania said Senussi had been sent to Tripoli “on the basis of guarantees given by the Libyan authorities”. Senussi has been in custody in Mauritania since March, after slipping illegally into the country.

Officials in Tripoli could not immediately confirm Senussi’s extradition, also reported by Mauritanian television. But foreign ministry spokesman Saad al-Shelmani said the country’s transitional post-Gaddafi government welcomed the news.

He added: “We have been asking for this move for a very long time.”

Senussi, Gaddafi’s former director of military intelligence and a brutal enforcer, is one of the world’s most wanted men. Libya, France and the international criminal court had all sought his extradition, with France seeking to question him in connection with the bombing of a French UTA passenger plane in 1989.

The ICC has indicted him for crimes against humanity in Libya.

Britain also has a strong interest in Senussi and is likely to seek to interview him in connection with the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, in which 270 died. At the time, Senussi headed Libya’s external security organisation. He is said to have recruited Abdel-Basset al-Megrahi, the man convicted of the bombing. Megrahi died at his home in Libya in May.

The US is also seeking Senussi’s arrest in connection with Lockerbie.

In an interview with the Guardian, Libya’s prime minister, Abdurrahim el-Keib, said that as well as his alleged role in the Lockerbie bombing, Senussi knew the identity of the killer of PC Yvonne Fletcher, shot dead outside the Libyan embassy in 1984.

“He’s the black box,” Keib said, adding: “I guarantee he [Senussi] was almost directly or indirectly involved in most if not all of the crimes [of the former regime]. That doesn’t mean others weren’t involved. But he definitely knows who they were.”

Senussi was married to Gaddafi’s sister-in-law, and was at the Libyan dictator’s side for over three decades. Leaked US diplomatic cables describe him as a trusted “senior regime figure”, “who had played a role as minder of the more troublesome Gaddafi offspring”.

They added: “Sanussi … is usually in physical proximity to the tent in which Gaddafi holds meetings with visiting foreign dignitaries and, according to members of Gaddafi’s protocol office, personally oversees Gaddafi’s close protection detail”.

Libya’s provisional government wants to try him in connection with numerous human rights abuses, including the massacre of 1,200 prisoners at the Abu Salim jail in 1996. During the 2011 Libyan civil war, he was blamed for orchestrating killings in the city of Benghazi and recruiting foreign mercenaries.

…

Luke Harding, Ian Black and agencies in Nouakchott
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 5 September 2012 13.25 BST

Find this story at 5 September 2012

© 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

UK spent millions training security forces from oppressive regimes

Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo received £2.4m in training and support for military and defence staff

Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir, who has been indicted for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity by the international criminal court. Photograph: Ibrahim Usta/AP

The UK government has spent millions of pounds on training military, police and security personnel from oppressive regimes that have arms embargoes in place, the Guardian has learned.

In the last five years, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo have received from the UK government £2.4m between them in training and support for military and defence personnel.

Sudan is the only country in the world where the sitting president, Omar al-Bashir, has been indicted for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity by the international criminal court, while in Congo extensive human rights abuses, including extra-judicial killings and torture, have been documented.

The Enough Project, which works with the American actor George Clooney to expose human rights abuses in both Sudan and Congo, says the two countries are the scene of some of the world’s most serious mass atrocities.

In information revealed in a freedom of information response from the Ministry of Defence a total of £75,406 has been spent on providing 44-week courses at the elite Royal Military Academy Sandhurst for Sudanese and Congolese forces. Other support includes military logistics, advanced command and staff courses, strategic intelligence and evaluating challenges to state sovereignty.

A total of £952,301 was spent on international peace support, which includes border security and stabilisation.

Much of the current focus of concern about human rights abuses in Sudan centres on conflict in the border areas with the newly formed country of South Sudan, such as Blue Nile, Nuba Mountains and South Kordofan, and the ongoing conflict in Darfur, where documented genocide shows 300,000 Darfuris have been killed and up to 4 million displaced. The Sudanese government has refused humanitarian aid access to the border areas.

In Congo many and varied human rights abuses have been documented, especially against opponents of the president, Joseph Kabila. A UN report earlier this year highlighted “serious human rights violations, including killings, disappearances and arbitrary detentions” during last November’s presidential elections. At least 33 people were killed by government forces during the elections, and hundreds were arrested and said they had been tortured. A delegation of UK officials has been investigating claims of torture in Congo and is due to report back shortly.

A leading Sudanese exile based in the UK, Dr Gebreil Fediel from Darfur, is challenging the legality of the UK government’s relationship with Sudan in the high court next month.

His legal team is bringing enforcement proceedings against the government for failing to provide him with protection under the refugee convention and travel documents to enable him to attend peace talks around the world. These talks aim to bring an end to the appalling human rights situation in Sudan. He is the leader of a major Sudanese opposition movement, the Justice and Equality Movement.

The high court judge Mr Justice Wyn Williams described the government’s approach to Fediel as “unreasonably restrictive” in January of this year.

In a statement to the court Fediel accused the government of failing to provide him with protection because there was a deal between the two governments.

“I believe the government of Sudan is requesting the UK government to treat me like this for political reasons. Their decisions to exclude and restrict me are underpinned by political and intelligence considerations.”

He expressed concern about the military support and training provided by the UK: “If it was and is the intention of the UK authorities to teach Sudan’s police and security officers how to conduct these matters in a democratic manner, it has failed. The brutality and genocidal activities of government of Sudan state organs against its own citizens is widely documented.”

In July the Foreign Office minister Lord Howell admitted about Sudan: “There is ample evidence that the military tactics being used raise concerns that the most serious crimes of concern to the international community may be being committed.”

Fediel said that as well as the UK’s provision of military support to his government the UK had also been providing support and training to Sudanese police and security officials. He said that in May a group of senior police officers came to the UK for training.

A letter from the former Foreign Office minister Ivan Lewis in 2010 stated: “The UK has a large police support programme in Democratic Republic of the Congo.”

Aaron Hall, the associate director of research for the Enough Project, said: “We would hope that any nation providing military and security support to these countries would have conditions attached to that support based on the adherence to international human rights laws and standards. If credible evidence exists that shows violation of those laws and standards whether within those countries borders or externally, we would urge those governments providing support to immediately suspend that support, and further to work with international and regional partners to hold those responsible for human rights abuses accountable for their actions.”

Jovanka Savic, Fediel’s solicitor, said: “There is an obligation under international law that requires states to bring to an end breaches of international law through legal means. This new evidence suggests that the UK is not helping to do this but is instead giving aid and assistance to the Sudanese government in a way that could be in breach of its international legal obligations. It is very concerning that support is being offered to DRC where many human rights abuses have been documented.”

She said the UK’s actions against Fediel, in preventing or restricting him from attending peace talks around the world, was helping to prolong the human suffering and conflict in Sudan.

“They are making this man’s life very difficult for political and arguably illegal reasons,” she said.

The government provided a response from four departments – the Home Office, the Ministry of Defence, the Foreign Office and the Department for International Development.

A spokesman said: “Strict criteria are applied to any training to ensure that it complies with overseas security and assistance human rights guidance. For each funding decision an assessment of the risk of human rights abuses is carried out. Her Majesty’s government conducts continual assessment of its programmes and human rights compliance is a cardinal criterion of this.

“UK officials have contact with international criminal court indictees only when this is considered essential and on a case-by-case basis. No contact with President Bashir has come about as a result of these programmes.”

However, the spokesman confirmed that some meetings had taken place between the previous and present ambassador to Sudan and Bashir. “The main occasions are when a British ambassador leaves or takes up their post in Khartoum.”

The spokesman said that international peace support was delivered to UN peacekeeping missions in Sudan and South Sudan and funding was provided for the African Union panel leading the talks aimed at ending the conflict.

He confirmed that nine senior national police officers from Sudan visited London in May to learn about policing and human rights in the UK, two of whom held the rank of major general. “The officers met the Sudanese ambassador at his London office as a protocol courtesy.” He said that community policing initiatives had been set up following the officers’ return to Sudan.
The reaction from Africa

Studies have shown that Congolese soldiers are responsible for at least 60% of reported rapes in the country. Last year the UN implicated them in the rape of at least 121 women over three days in the village of Nyakiele, in South Kivu province. This came after the gang-rape of at least 47 women by government troops in North Kivu.

The UN’s high commissioner for human rights has said: “The Congolese army remains responsible for a significant number of human rights violations, including sexual violence.”

The opposition Union for Democracy and Social Progress (UDPS) was at the sharp end of last year’s election crackdown and claims soldiers were used to intimidate voters and interfere with ballot papers. It expressed concern at the use of British resources to train and support the military.

Albert Moleka, the party’s cabinet director and spokesman, said: “Training is a normal part of the co-operation of our two countries but we might say it is the responsibility of the DRC to use those who have been trained properly. That can only be done by a legitimate political authority. Unfortunately we don’t have a legitimate political authority. There is a huge gap of mistrust between the army and the population.”

He added: “In our experience it is the elite troops with the best equipment who are used against the population. I think military co-operation should be attached with strict conditions that ensure force is never used against the people. That is difficult for outside countries to monitor.”

Moleka said there was a long tradition of Congo’s military elite studying at academies in Britain and other foreign countries. “But when they come back, what functions do they occupy? How can they help their country? They’re not given the opportunity to bring what they learn to change the attitudes and behaviour of the army.”

The Congolese army, badly paid and fed, is still struggling to maintain discipline after the integration of a Tutsi rebel militia following a 2009 peace treaty. Yet the international community, including the world’s biggest UN peacekeeping operation, has put faith in it to quell violence in the country’s war-torn east.

In May, Human Rights Watch reported that Sudanese government forces were carrying out indiscriminate bombings and abuses against civilians in southern Kordofan. It called on Sudan to investigate the discovery of a cluster bomb in the region. Witnesses interviewed in Blue Nile also described serious abuses by the armed forces. The onslaughts have created tens of thousands of refugees living in appalling conditions.

…

Diane Taylor, and David Smith in Johannesburg
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 25 September 2012 11.33 BST

Find this story at 25 September 2012
© 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

Jack Straw accused of misleading MPs over torture of Libyan dissidents

Former foreign secretary named in legal documents concerning Gaddafi opponents held after MI6 tip-offs

The documents claim Jack Straw did not tell the truth when he told the Commons foreign affairs committee in 2005 that Britain was not involved in any rendition operations. Photograph: EPA

Jack Straw, the former foreign secretary, and Sir Mark Allen, a former senior MI6 officer, have been cited as key defendants in court documents that describe in detail abuse meted out to Libyan dissidents and their families after being abducted and handed to Muammar Gaddafi’s secret police with the help of British intelligence.

The documents accuse Straw of misleading MPs about Britain’s role in the rendition of two leading dissidents – Abdel Hakim Belhaj and Sami al-Saadi – and say MI6 must have known they risked being tortured. They say British intelligence officers provided Libyan interrogators with questions to ask their captives and themselves flew to Tripoli to interview the detainees in jail.

They recount how Belhaj was chained, hooded, and beaten; his pregnant wife, Fatima Bouchar, punched and bound; how Saadi was repeatedly assaulted; his wife, Ait Baaziz, hooded and ill-treated; and their children traumatised, as they were abducted and jailed in Libya following tip-offs by MI6 and the CIA in 2004.

Belhaj and Saadi were leading members of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, which opposed Gaddafi. Belhaj became head of the Tripoli Brigade during last year’s revolution and is a leading Libyan political figure. They are suing Straw, Allen, MI6, MI5, the Foreign Office, the Home Office, and the attorney general, for damages for unlawful detention, conspiracy to injure, negligence, and abuse of public office. It is believed to be the first time such action has been taken against a former British foreign secretary.

The court documents, served by the law firm Leigh Day and the legal charity and human rights group, Reprieve, allege:

• MI6 alerted Libyan intelligence to the whereabouts of Belhaj and his family. They were held in Malaysia and Thailand and flown to Libya in a CIA plane.

• The CIA and MI6 co-operated in the rendition of Saadi and his family from Hong Kong to Libya via Thailand.

• Straw and his co-defendants knew that torture was endemic in Gaddafi’s Libya.

• British intelligence officers sent detailed questions to the Libyan authorities to be used in Belhaj and Saadi’s interrogations.

• Straw did not tell the truth when he told the Commons foreign affairs committee in 2005 that Britain was not involved in any rendition operations.

• Evidence by Sir John Scarlett, the head of MI6, to the parliamentary intelligence and security committee (ISC) in 2006 that his agency did not assist in any rendition to countries other than the US or the detainee’s country of origin was incorrect and misleading. Bouchar is Moroccan, and Baaziz is Algerian, and neither had been to Libya before their abduction.

• Evidence by an MI5 witness to the Special Immigration Appeals Commission about the renditions was untrue and misleading.

• According to the US flight plan rendering Belhaj and his wife to Libya, the plane would refuel at the American base on the British Indian Ocean territory of Diego Garcia. If it had done so it would contradict assurances made to MPs by the former foreign secretary David Miliband. Referring to the coalition government’s plans for secret courts, Khadidja al-Saadi, who was 12 when she was abducted, said: “I tried writing to Ken Clarke [former justice secretary] about my case – I told him that having a secret court judge my kidnap was the kind of thing Gaddafi would have done.”

Her father said: “After my rendition I spent years in Gaddafi’s jails, and a secret ‘court’ sentenced me to death. Even now, after everything that happened, I hope and pray British justice will serve me better than this. My family has asked the government to apologise, and the government has refused.”

Cori Crider, Reprieve’s legal director, said: “The public have every right to know just how high the plot to kidnap these families went. Did it stop at Allen and Straw? Or did Tony Blair know what was going on in a torture chamber down the road while he hugged Gaddafi in a tent? You won’t find the answer in Straw’s book [Last Man Standing].”

If the justice and security “secret courts” bill, passes “we will never know”, Crider added.

The abductions took place after the Blair government embraced Gaddafi following the Libyan leader’s promise in 2003 to abandon nuclear weapons. Allen developed close relations with Gaddafi’s intelligence chief, Moussa Koussa, documents unearthed in Tripoli show.

Whitehall sources say that in their dealings with Gaddafi MI6 was carrying out “ministerially authorised government policy” and were given assurances by the Libyans that the detainees would not be tortured. The Guardian has asked Straw about the renditions. He has said he cannot comment because of a police investigation into the affair.
…

Richard Norton-Taylor
The Guardian, Wednesday 10 October 2012

Find this story at 10 October 2012
© 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

G4S ‘warned’ over killer security guard Danny Fitzsimons

Security firm G4S was sent warnings not to employ an armed guard in Iraq just days before he murdered two colleagues, a BBC investigation has found.

Private security guard Paul McGuigan, from the Scottish Borders, was shot dead by Danny Fitzsimons in 2009 in Baghdad while on a protection contract.

Another man, Australian Darren Hoare, was also killed.

All were working for UK contractor G4S, which was operating under the name ArmorGroup in the region.
Violent criminal

In a BBC documentary, it is revealed that a G4S worker sent a series of emails to the company in London, warning them about Fitzsimons’s previous convictions and unstable behaviour.

The anonymous whistleblower signed one email “a concerned member of the public and father”.

The worker warned G4S: “I am alarmed that he will shortly be allowed to handle a weapon and be exposed to members of the public.

“I am speaking out because I feel that people should not be put at risk.”

Another email, sent as Fitzsimons was due to start work in Baghdad, said: “Having made you aware of the issues regarding the violent criminal Danny Fitzsimons, it has been noted that you have not taken my advice and still choose to employ him in a position of trust.

“I have told you that he remains a threat and you have done nothing.”

Within 36 hours of arriving in Iraq in August 2009, Fitzsimons – a former paratrooper – had shot and killed the two men after what he claimed was a drunken brawl.

An Iraqi colleague was also wounded as Fitzsimons tried to flee the scene.

Fitzsimons had worked as a private security contractor before in Iraq, but he had been sacked for punching a client.

At the time he was taken on by G4S, Fitzsimons also had a criminal record, was facing outstanding charges of assault and a firearms offence, and had been diagnosed by doctors as having PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder).

In the documentary, the parents of Paul McGuigan call for the company to face criminal charges over the killing.

His mother Corinne Boyd-Russell, from Innerleithen in the Borders, said: “[Fitzsimons] fired the bullets. But the gun was put in his hand by G4S ArmorGroup. They put the gun in that man’s hand.

“I want G4S to be charged with corporate manslaughter and be held accountable for what they did.”

The parents of Danny Fitzsimons, who is serving 20 years in a Baghdad prison after being sentenced for the murders in February 2011, were also shocked to hear about the existence of the emails.

Liz Fitzsimons, from Manchester, said: “And they still took him out there? They [G4S] need to be taken to task for that.

“The people who we feel are responsible, who we hold responsible for putting that gun in Danny’s hand, are without a shadow of a doubt G4S.”

A G4S spokesman admitted that its screening of Danny Fitzsimons “was not completed in line with the company’s procedures”.

It said vetting had been tightened since the incident.

Regarding the email warnings, the spokesman G4S told the BBC it was aware of the allegations but that an internal investigation showed “no such emails were received by any member of our HR department”.

He did not say whether anyone else in the company had seen them.

An inquest into the death of Paul McGuigan, a former Royal Marine, is due to begin in December.

The revelations in the Fitzsimons case come just weeks after G4S found itself at the centre of a crisis over its inability to meet its commitment to recruit security staff for the Olympics in London.

It is the biggest security company in the world in an industry that is worth about £400bn globally.

Often controversial, the sector has been dogged by allegations of abuse and violence in countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan.

However, in the BBC documentary, Britain’s Private War, it reveals the growing extent to which the UK government relies on armed security companies to protect its interests overseas.

The UK has spent almost half a billion pounds on such firms since the end of the Iraq war in 2003.

Yet British companies – said to be the key players – remain unregulated.

The programme-makers heard stories of contractors being forced to work on dangerous missions with inadequate equipment, incident reports sanitised to protect company reputations and numerous deaths of former soldiers.

One security contractor, Bob Shepherd, said: “We know when a soldier dies it’s all over the newspapers, it’s on the TV. But we never know when security contractors die.

“For the companies it’s bad for business, for the government it’s hiding the true cost of these conflicts.

“If the British taxpayers knew the total numbers of people that have died on behalf of British security companies in places like Iraq and Afghanistan they would be shocked.”

Instead of formal regulation, the UK government has opted for the companies to set up their own body to monitor themselves, called the Security in Complex Environments Group (SCEG).

Chris Sanderson, the chairman of SCEG, told the programme his organisation did not have powers to punish poor behaviour.

Asked what action he would be able to take against companies which did not uphold the best standards, he said: “If they continue to operate underneath the radar, very little.

“What the majority of the industry is keen to do is to ensure that those companies who are behaving less professionally are identified and commercially disadvantaged.

“At the moment, signing an international code of conduct means nothing apart from perhaps a wish to differentiate themselves in the market place.

“In terms of substance and performance it means nothing.

“What will mean a great deal is when the standards are in the place and there is an independent verification of those standards.”

In a statement, the foreign Office said it was vital to work in partnership with the industry to effectively prevent abuses by private security companies abroad.

BBC Scotland Investigates: Britain’s Private War, BBC Two Scotland on Monday 1 October at 21:00 and soon after on the BBC iplayer.

Find this story at 1 October 2012

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Briton Danny Fitzsimons jailed in Iraq for contractors’ murders

Danny Fitzsimons avoids death sentence but family say his PTSD meant he should never had been employed in a war zone

Danny Fitzsimons is escorted out of court after his sentencing in Baghdad. Photograph: Karim Kadim/AP

A former British soldier who claims to be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder has been jailed for 20 years in Iraq for the murder of two fellow security contractors during a whisky-fuelled argument, becoming the first westerner convicted in the country since the 2003 invasion.

Danny Fitzsimons, 31, a former paratrooper from Middleton, Manchester, shot dead Briton Paul McGuigan and Australian Darren Hoare, colleagues at the UK security firm ArmorGroup, now part of G4S, and injured an Iraqi security guard 36 hours after arriving in Iraq in 2009.

His family said they were “euphoric” that Fitzsimons had escaped the death penalty, but said he was suffering from severe PTSD and should never had been employed in a war zone.

Fitzsimons’s stepmother and father, Liz and Eric Fitzsimons, from Rochdale, said the Ministry of Defence had “let him down and continue to let down an awful lot of soldiers who come out with PTSD and aren’t offered any help”.

They called for legislation to help vet those hired by private security firms.

Fitzsimons, who joined the army at 16 and was discharged eight years later, admitted shooting the men but claimed it was in self-defence – an argument rejected by the court.

McGuigan, 37, a former Royal Marine originally from Peebles, Scottish Borders, was shot twice in the chest and through the mouth. Weeks after his death his fiancee, Nicci Prestage, from Tameside, Greater Manchester, gave birth prematurely to his daughter, Elsie-Mai.

Hoare, also 37, a father of three from Brisbane, was shot through the temple at close range.

Fitzsimons said as he was led from the courtroom that he was happy with the sentence. But asked whether he thought his trial had been fair, he said: “No.”

His Iraqi lawyer, Tariq Harb, said: “This is a very good sentence. I saved him from the gallows.”

He told Reuters: “A year in prison in Iraq is nine months and this means that 20 years in prison will, in fact, be 15 years.”

…

Caroline Davies
The Guardian, Monday 28 February 2011 17.23 GMT

Find this story at 28 February 2012

© 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

Leaked emails warned G4S over Iraq murders

The sun never sets on the UK’s armies of private security firms (Image via Shutterstock)

In the wake of the Olympic Games vetting scandal, private security company G4S may have hoped that its period on the public rack had come to an end. But G4S’s vetting, it appears, is fraught with failure abroad just as it is in East London – only with far deadlier consequences.

Tonight on BBC Scotland, reporter Samantha Poling investigates the the deaths of private security contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan and the lax security standards of the mutil-billion pound firms that send young men to war zones and arm them with deadly weapons.

In the summer of 2009, former British paratrooper turned private security contractor Daniel Fitzsimons shot dead two colleagues in Baghdad’s highly-securitised Green Zone. In a vodka-fuelled squabble and only 36 hours after arriving in the sandy nation, Fitzsimons killed Paul McGuigan, from Peebles in Scotland, and Australian Darren Hoare.

The three men had come to Iraq to work for the British private security company ArmorGroup Iraq, which G4S now owns.

While the media widely reported on the deaths at the time and on Fitzsimon’s subsequent trial before the Supreme Court of Iraq, BBC Scotland tonight reveals a shocking new fact: a whistleblower had sent G4S numerous emails only days before Fitzsimons arrived in Iraq warning the company that the lives of fellow contractors would be put at risk if he were given a weapon.

‘I am alarmed that he [Fitzsimons] will shortly be allowed to handle a weapon and be exposed to members of the public,’ the whistleblower wrote, who signed off as ‘a concerned member of the public and father.’

‘I am speaking out because I feel that people should not be put at risk.’

Fitzsimons had a criminal record, including firearm and assault convictions. The former British paratrooper was also suffering post-traumatic disorder from the gruesome sights he had witnessed during previous work in war zones such as Kosovo. Despite this background, G4S employed Fitzsimons and sent him to Iraq.

The mother of slain British contractor, Paul McGuigan, said, ‘[Fitzsimons] fired the bullets. But the gun was put in his hand by G4S ArmorGroup. They put the gun in that man’s hand.’

‘I want G4S to be charged with corporate manslaughter and be held accountable for what they did.’

Responding to the BBC Scotland investigation, G4S acknowledged that Fitzsimon’s ‘screening was not completed in line with the company’s procedures.’ G4S claims to have since improved.

The investigation shines a light into the murky world of private security. BBC Scotland spoke with security contactors who claim to have been forced to work on dangerous tasks with the wrong equipment. Numerous incidents have not been reported for the sake of G4S’s reputation, one of them alleged.

Bob Shepherd, a security contractor, told Poling, ‘We know when a soldier dies it’s all over the newspapers, it’s on the TV. But we never know when security contractors die.’

In response to the news that a whistleblower had repeatedly warned G4S about hiring Fitzsimons, the company told BBC Scotland that it was unable to find the email trail. It appears that a company selling security management software that allows businesses to monitor staff in the farthest reaches of the world is unable to carry out a simple email search; ‘I can’t track down the relevant individual so I am afraid we can not comment further on when we received the emails,’ G4S said.

G4S, one of the major players in the constantly growing yet constantly scandal-ridden private security sector, had a 2011 turnover of £7.5bn.

The International Code of Conduct for Private Service Providers is currently aiming to improve standards in the sector, which is dominated by UK-based companies. Out of the 511 companies to have signed up to the Code, 177 have headquarters in the UK – more than three times the number based in the United States of America.

Britannia may no longer rule the waves, but it does rule the world of private security.

BBC Scotland’s investigation, Britain’s Private War, airs on Monday October 1 at 21:00.
The editor of the Bureau worked with Sam Poling on the Scottish Bafta winning film Security Wars.
http://www.iainoverton.com/blog/?portfolio=security-wars-bafta-prix-circom

October 1st, 2012 | by Zlatina Georgieva | Published in All Stories, Bureau Recommends

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Scandal-hit G4S ‘was warned not to employ security guard’ before he murdered two colleagues in Iraq

Danny Fitzsimons, 31, was sentenced to 20 years in 2011 for killing Scot Paul McGuigan, 37, and Australian Darren Hoare, 37, in Baghdad in 2009
All were working for UK security firm G4S, operating as ArmorGroup
A BBC probe claims a G4S whistleblower warned them about Fitzsimons’ previous convictions and unstable behaviour before his posting
G4S claim nobody ever saw the email warnings
Victims’ families call for G4S to be prosecuted for corporate manslaughter
It comes a week after it emerged G4S chief Nick Buckles will keep his job despite review finding the firm guilty of ‘mishandling’ its Olympic contract

Security firm G4S was warned not to employ an armed guard in Iraq days before he murdered two colleagues – one of them an ex-Royal Marine, a new BBC documentary claims.

Danny Fitzsimons, 31, was sentenced to at least 20 years in 2011 for killing Paul McGuigan, 37, from Peebles in Scotland, and Australian Darren Hoare, also 37, in Baghdad in August 2009.

All were working for UK security firm G4S, operating as ArmorGroup in the region.

G4S controversially failed to supply enough staff during the Olympics this summer and was recently handed a £13million Government contract to monitor sex offenders in Scotland.

BBC Scotland Investigates: Britain’s Private War, to be screened on BBC2 tonight, claims that a G4S whistleblower sent a series of emails to the company in London, warning them about Fitzsimons’ previous convictions and unstable behaviour.

Signing one email ‘a concerned member of the public and father’, the anonymous worker warns G4S: ‘I am alarmed that he will shortly be allowed to handle a weapon and be exposed to members of the public. I am speaking out because I feel that people should not be put at risk.’

Another email, sent as Fitzsimons was due to start work in Baghdad, says: ‘Having made you aware of the issues regarding the violent criminal Danny Fitzsimons, it has been noted that you have not taken my advice and still choose to employ him in a position of trust. I have told you that he remains a threat and you have done nothing.’

The programme reports that Fitzsimons had worked as a private security contractor before in Iraq, but he had been sacked for punching a client.

In the documentary, the parents of Paul McGuigan, whose fiancée Nicci Prestage gave birth to his baby daughter in October 2009, call for the company to face criminal charges over the killing.

In the documentary, Mr McGuigan’s mother Corinne Boyd-Russell, from Innerleithen, in the Borders, said: ‘[Fitzsimons] fired the bullets. But the gun was put in his hand by G4S ArmorGroup. They put the gun in that man’s hand.

‘I want G4S to be charged with corporate manslaughter and be held accountable for what they did.’
The parents of Fitzsimons were also shocked to hear about the existence of the emails.

Fitzsimons’ mother Liz, from Manchester, said: ‘And they still took him out there? They [G4S] need to be taken to task for that.

‘The people who we feel are responsible, who we hold responsible for putting that gun in Danny’s hand, are without a shadow of a doubt G4S.’

Fitzsimons became the first Westerner to be convicted by an Iraqi court since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion when he was convicted in February last year, narrowly escaping the death penalty.

The former security contractor from Rochdale admitted shooting the men but claimed it was self-defence.

The men had been out drinking and the other two tried to kill him during an altercation, Fitzsimons said during previous testimony. He also claimed to be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.

A G4S spokesman said: ‘We are aware of the allegation over emails but following an internal IT investigation it is clear that no such emails were received by any employee before the incident.

‘We have not been shown any formal documentation which proves Mr Fitzsimons had post-traumatic stress disorder.

‘This was a tragic case and our thoughts remain with the families of both Paul McGuigan and Darren Hoare, who were valued and highly respected employees of the company, and who continue to be sadly missed by their families, colleagues and friends alike.

‘We confirmed publicly on September 15 2009 that, in this particular case, although there was evidence that Mr Fitzsimons falsified and apparently withheld material information during the recruitment process, his screening was not completed in line with the company’s procedures.

‘Our screening processes should have been better implemented in this situation but it is a matter of speculation what, if any, role this may have played in the incident.’

Since his conviction G4S has been roundly criticised for its handling of Olympic security arrangements.

Last week, it emerged G4S chief Nick Buckles will keep his job despite an independent review finding the bungling security firm guilty of ‘mishandling’ its Olympic contract.

Mr Buckles, whose pay and benefits package was worth £5.3million last year, had been widely expected to lose his lucrative post over the fiasco.

But instead, two of his deputies will pay the price for the group’s failures during the Games.

The company’s UK boss David Taylor-Smith and events chief Ian Horseman Sewell have both resigned.

…

By Graham Grant

PUBLISHED: 08:30 GMT, 1 October 2012 | UPDATED: 09:33 GMT, 1 October 2012

Find this story at 1 October 2012

Published by Associated Newspapers Ltd

Part of the Daily Mail, The Mail on Sunday & Metro Media Group
© Associated Newspapers Ltd

Olympics security Seventh Report of Session 2012–13 Volume I and Olympics security written evidence – United Kingdom Parliament

Olympics security Seventh Report of Session 2012–13 Volume I

and

Olympics security written evidence – United Kingdom Parliament 

Senior G4S executives resign over Olympics security failure

But board decides chief executive Nick Buckles should keep his job in ‘best interest of company and all its stakeholders’

G4S’s chief operating officer David Taylor-Smith has resigned but chief executive Nick Buckles keeps his job. Photograph: PA

Two senior executives at G4S have resigned over the company’s failure to deliver its contract for the London 2012 Olympics, but chief executive Nick Buckles has kept his job.

David Taylor-Smith, chief operating officer, and Ian Horseman-Sewell, managing director for G4S Global Events, are stepping down following the firm’s failure to meet its Olympics commitments. The G4S board, though, has concluded Buckles should stay on “in the best interest of the company and all of its stakeholders”.

Taylor-Smith and Horseman-Sewell are leaving following an inquiry into the Olympics debacle by PricewaterhouseCoopers. It found G4S had failed to strengthen its management and its “structures and processes” to handle the “unique and complex” task of delivering more than 10,000 trained guards to protect Olympic venues.

G4S summarised PwC’s conclusions in a statement to the stock market on Friday morning. It said: “The company has management and other structures and processes that have proved highly effective in delivering the company’s regular business over many years but it did not recognise these structures and processes needed augmenting for the Olympic contract.

“The monitoring and tracking of the security workforce, management information and the project management framework and practices were ineffective to address the scale, complexities and dependencies of the Olympic contract. Together this caused the failure of the company to deliver the contract requirements in full and resulted in the identification of the key problems at a very late stage.”

G4S’s failure meant the British army was called in to provide security during the Olympics fortnight.

The G4S chairman, John Connolly, said the company admitted it had not delivered. He said: “G4S has accepted responsibility for its failure to deliver fully on the Olympic contract. We apologise for this and we thank the military and the police for the vital roles they played in ensuring the delivery of a safe and secure Games.”

Buckles faced heavy criticism when he appeared before the home affairs committee in July, where David Winnick MP told him the company’s reputation was in tatters.

The G4S board, though, has concluded that Buckles should not lose his job.

“Whilst the chief executive has ultimate responsibility for the company’s performance, the review did not identify significant shortcomings in his performance or serious failings attributable to him in connection with the Olympic contract,” it said.

…

Graeme Wearden
guardian.co.uk, Friday 28 September 2012 08.08 BST

Find this story at 28 September 2012
© 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

Two G4S directors resign in wake of Olympics fiasco… but chief executive Nick Buckles keeps his job Chief operating officer and head of global sales to go after Olympics blunder

Report found monitoring and tracking of security workforce was inadequate
Also concluded that management failed to appreciate scale and exact nature of the project

The head of bungling security firm G4S will keep his job despite an independent review finding the company guilty of ‘mishandling’ its Olympic contract.

Embattled Nick Buckles, whose pay and benefits package was worth £5.3million last year, had been widely expected to lose his lucrative post over the fiasco.

But instead, two of his deputies will pay the price for the group’s failures during the Games.

The company’s UK boss David Taylor-Smith and events chief Ian Horseman Sewell have both resigned.

G4S signed a £284million contract to provide 10,400 Games security guards, but just 16 days before the opening ceremony it admitted it had only fulfilled 83 per cent of contracted shifts and could not deliver and the army was drafted in.

A damning report by accountancy firm Pricewaterhouse- Coopers found the company’s handling of the deal was ‘ineffectual’.

It said the group was ‘capable of fulfilling the contract’ but ‘did not recognise’ the scale of the work, and listed a catalogue of errors, including bad management.

Controversially, however, PwC said it was not ‘in the best interests of the company’ for Mr Buckles to leave, despite the fact he was twice dragged in front of MPs to explain the fiasco.

G4S said in a statement: ‘Whilst the CEO has ultimate responsibility for the company’s performance, the review did not identify significant shortcomings in his performance or serious failings attributable to him in connection with the Olympic contract.’

Labour MP Keith Vaz, who is chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee and led the hearings into the G4S blunders, said the decision to keep Mr Buckles was ‘not closure’.

But G4S chairman John Connolly said: ‘[Mr Buckles] couldn’t be expected to in detail be responsible for every large contract.’

Chief operating officer David Taylor-Smith, pictured left, is one of two senior directors to have resigned after the G4S Olympics security fiasco

The report said the contract problems were largely specific to the Olympics, with the company not planning sufficiently for the scale and complexity of what was needed.

Taylor-Smith was responsible for the contract and for ensuring it was delivered on budget and on time, while Sewell was the account director who said just before the Games that the company could have delivered two events of that scale at the same time.

However, Buckles, who has been with the world’s biggest security group for 27 years, has been the face of the Olympic failure, taking to television and radio to apologise to the British public and twice being hauled in front of a Parliamentary Committee to explain what had happened.

London Mayor Boris Johnson told LBC 97.3 radio it was right the G4S bosses quit over the Olympics fiasco.

He said: ‘The rank and file, the troops on the ground, did a wonderful job, but when you look at what happened in the management of those hordes of G4S employees who did a great job, I’m not going to try and persuade them to stay this morning.’

G4S fulfilled 83 per cent of contracted shifts at the Games, but failed to provide the required 10,400 contracted security guards
G4S PRISONER ESCAPES

Police have issued a photograph of a prisoner who escaped from custody by climbing out of a window at a court.

Michael Davidson, 27, absconded from Tain Sheriff Court in the Highlands on Tuesday afternoon.

Northern Constabulary said that while he is not dangerous, he should not be approached.

They urged anyone who sees him to contact police immediately.

The force said that the man was the responsibility of security firm G4S at the time.

It is believed the prisoner escaped through a window in the building.

G4S said they are carrying out a full investigation into the incident and will be working closely with the Scottish Prison Service and relevant authorities to investigate the circumstances.

G4S has largely prospered under Buckles, who has presided over a share price rise of some 76 percent since being elevated to group CEO in July 2005.

But investors have worried that the Olympics affair could jeopardise G4S’s relationship with the government, a core customer, at a time when Britain wants to heavily involve the private sector in running public services.

Government deals account for over half of G4S’s £1.8billion of British revenue and make up more than 20 per cent of its pipeline of potential UK work, which includes prison management deals and electronic tagging contracts.

G4S, which has estimated its loss on the Olympics contract at around £50 million, is the world’s biggest private security company with more than 650,000 staff worldwide.

…

By Daily Mail Reporter

PUBLISHED: 08:00 GMT, 28 September 2012 | UPDATED: 23:51 GMT, 28 September 2012

Find this story at 28 September 2012

Published by Associated Newspapers Ltd

Part of the Daily Mail, The Mail on Sunday & Metro Media Group
© Associated Newspapers Ltd

A sorry end for the ‘scapegoats’ at sharp end of G4S fiasco

Olympian hubris prompts world’s second-largest employer to sacrifice its senior executives. Kim Sengupta reports

Asked in an interview not so long ago what had been his best experiences in life, David Taylor-Smith responded that one of them was “being chased by a rhino”. The chief operating officer of G4S must have felt he was undergoing something similar in the aftermath of the Olympics debacle with the sensation perhaps not so enticing this time around.

The rhino has caught up with Mr Taylor-Smith with painful consequences. He is one of two executives who have paid the price for the security firm’s failure to provide enough guards for the London Games and the humiliation and opprobrium that followed.

The way Mr Taylor-Smith was treated at the end, say his friends, was grossly unfair towards someone who has worked hard for the company for the last 14 years. The news of his departure was leaked to Sky television 36 hours before the board made their decision public; he was, they held, being made a scapegoat for failings which go far wider in the management.

Mr Taylor-Smith’s detractors, and there are a few in G4S, hold that he was the author of his own misfortune and that the Olympics shortcomings were the result of his management style which was characterised by an unwillingness to listen to the views of others and surround himself with yes men.

Following the company’s failure to provide the 10,400 security guards for the Olympics, G4S commissioned an inquiry by PricewaterhouseCoopers. It found that G4S had failed to strengthen its management and its “structures and processes” to handle the “unique and complex” task it faced.

Although Mr Taylor-Smith and Ian Horseman-Sewell, managing director of global events, resigned, the chief executive, Nick Buckles, has kept his job, the board deciding on this “in the best interest of the company and all its shareholders”. Whilst the chief executive has ultimate responsibility for the company’s performance, the review did not identify significant shortcomings in his performance or serious failings attributable to him in connection with the Olympics contract.

Until the recent turn of events, allies of Mr Taylor-Smith hoped that he would one day succeed Mr Buckles, heading the world’s largest security company with branches in 125 countries, and, with 657,000 employees on its books, the third-largest global employer after Wal-Mart and Foxconn.

According to some former colleagues, a private dinner in January celebrating the chief operating officer post was described as in honour of “the king-in-waiting”.

The Olympics put paid to that. It is ironic that the military had to step in to make up the shortfall in the security numbers. Mr Taylor-Smith had been an Army officer and, during his tenure, there was a dramatic increase in the numbers of ex-servicemen who were employed with huge excitement, it was said, on his part if they were SAS or from the Special Boat Service. Some of these appointments, say colleagues, were successful. But others not.

After the Army, Mr Taylor-Smith worked in conservation programmes in Latin America and Africa – where he had his rhino experience – before joining Securicor, which later formed part of G4S, in 1998. In 2006 he was appointed CEO of G4S in the UK and Ireland when the company was undergoing rapid expansion which saw it swallow up firms such as ArmorGroup and Chubb.

One of Mr Taylor-Smith’s main claims to fame in the company, and a great boost to his upward trajectory was the acquisition of justice sector, contracts from the Government enabling them to operate detention centres. The business was highly lucrative but also led to controversy. There were highly publicised and embarrassing cases of prisoner escapes. Last year it was claimed that G4S guards had been repeatedly warned about the use of force on detainees and asylum seekers after the death of an Angolan deportee, Jimmy Mubenga, on a board a departing British Airways flight. An internal document urged management to “meet this problem head on before the worst happens” and that G4S was “playing Russian roulette with detainees’ lives.”

…

Kim Sengupta
Saturday, 29 September 2012

Find this story at 29 September 2012

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How MI5 plotted to destroy The Stones: The astonishing truth behind the drug raid that saw Jagger jailed – and lumbered Marianne Faithfull for life with the tale of THAT Mars Bar

 

Taken on the beach at West Wittering, a small seaside resort in Sussex, the photograph shows a young Keith Richards giving a friendly hug to a man he knew only as ‘Acid King David’.

As his nickname suggested, the Rolling Stones’ mysterious new hanger-on possessed an encyclopaedic knowledge of all the newest strains of LSD, combined with an almost magical ability to procure them.

For Richards, that was reason enough to embrace anybody, but the friendly smile of the ‘Acid King’ in that picture, taken on a cold Sunday afternoon in February 1967, belied the intent of a man who was far from all he seemed.

He had joined Richards, Mick Jagger and various of their entourage for a weekend at Redlands, Richards’s pretty half-timbered cottage, just a few miles away from West Wittering.

This chocolate-box country residence seemed bizarrely at odds with Richards’s hard-living vagabond image, but its name was about to become synonymous with one of the most notorious drugs busts in rock ’n’ roll history.

Many lurid details would emerge from the Redlands raid.

Most famously, there were reports that the police had discovered Mick Jagger’s then girlfriend Marianne Faithfull in a compromising position with a Mars Bar.

This story, pure invention as it turned out, has overshadowed a far more intriguing detail of the case.

As I have discovered, while researching a new biography of Mick Jagger, the Redlands raid was part of an extraordinary plot, orchestrated by our own MI5 and the FBI and designed to put an early end to the Rolling Stones’ career.

The details were revealed to me by Maggie Abbott, a British film agent based in Los Angeles.

During the Eighties, she befriended an eccentric figure named David Jove, producer of one of the earliest cable television shows, and the host of numerous fancy-dress ‘happenings’ at his cave-like studio in West Hollywood.

After swearing her to secrecy, Jove confided that his real name was David Snyderman and that he was the man known to the Rolling Stones as ‘Acid King David’.

And any doubt about this is dispelled by photographs of him in various of his strange avant-garde productions.

Although he is camouflaged by facepaint, his short curly hair and sensitive cheekbones are unquestionably those of the weekend guest photographed with Keith Richards on West Wittering beach a few hours before the bust.

In January 1967, according to the account he gave Maggie Abbott, Snyderman was a failed TV actor, drifting around Europe in the American hippie throng with Swinging London as his final destination.

At Heathrow Airport he was caught with drugs in his luggage and expected to be thrown into jail and instantly deported.

Instead, British Customs handed him over to some ‘heavy people’ who hinted they belonged to MI5 and told him there was ‘a way out’ of his predicament. This was to infiltrate the Rolling Stones, supply Mick Jagger and Keith Richard with drugs, and then get them busted.

According to Snyderman, MI5 were operating on behalf of an FBI offshoot known as COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) set up by the FBI’s director, J. Edgar Hoover, in the Twenties to protect national security and maintain the existing social and political order.

By 1967, COINTELPRO was focusing on the subversive effect of rock music on America’s young, particularly the kind coming from Britain, and most particularly the kind played by the Rolling Stones.

That they were such a target for the intelligence services had much to do with the machinations of their first manager, Andrew Loog Oldham.

As Beatlemania swept the nation, and the Fab Four appeared on the Royal Variety Show, respectfully ducking their mop-tops before the Queen Mother, he realised that The Beatles’ original fans felt let down by their mainstream success. Where was the excitement, the rebellion, in liking the same band your parents, or even grandparents did?

Oldham set about marketing the Rolling Stones as the anti-Beatles, the scowling flip side of the coin being minted by the Liverpudlians’ manager Brian Epstein like some modern-day Midas. ‘They don’t wash much and they aren’t all that keen on clothes,’ Oldham told the Press. From then on, the word that went ahead of them was ‘dirty’.

Nothing was further from the truth. Mick was utterly fastidious about personal cleanliness and Brian Jones washed his eye-obscuring blond helmet so religiously each day that the others nicknamed him ‘Mister Shampoo’.
Rolling Stones first manager Andrew Loog Oldham set about marketing the band as the anti-Beatles… ‘They don’t wash much and they aren’t all that keen on clothes,’ Oldham told the Press. From then on, the word that went ahead of them was ‘dirty’

The Stones were also fashion-mad but Oldham always insisted they should go onstage in the same Carnaby Street gear in which they’d arrived at the theatre. In an era when pop bands invariably wore matching suits, this appalled the parents of their young fans, but it was as nothing compared to the scandal caused by the Stones’ hair.

When they burst on to the music scene in 1963 it was in a Britain that still equated masculinity with the Army recruit’s stringent ‘short back and sides’. Curling over ears and brushing collars, the Stones’ long locks were almost as much as an affront to polite society as Mick Jagger’s unusually large mouth and vivid red lips. These seemed to have an indecency all of their own, even before they snarled out the Stones’ highly provocative lyrics.

In June 1965, their single Satisfaction created the greatest scandal in America since Elvis Presley first swivelled his hips exactly a decade earlier. With the line ‘tryin’ to make some girl’, it contained the first direct reference to sex in any pop song, an outrage compounded 18 months later when the Stones released Let’s Spend The Night Together.

There had been innumerable songs about nocturnal trysts but never one with so barefaced an invitation to get between the sheets. The furore was such that, when the Stones previewed the song on America’s Ed Sullivan television show in January 1967, Mick was forced to change the crucial phrase to Let’s Spend Some Time Together.

He agreed to do so, but only with much pointed eye-rolling every time he reached the newly-neutered line.

All this was bad enough, but then came a truly unforgivable incident. A week after that appearance on the Ed Sullivan show, and just three weeks before the Redlands drugs bust, the Stones were invited to top the bill on Sunday Night At The London Palladium, the much-loved TV variety show which had been the making of The Beatles.

During rehearsals they announced that they would not take part in the hallowed tradition of acts waving goodbye to viewers from a revolving podium during the grand finale.

In the end they compromised — standing off the podium and waving, with clear sarcasm and disrespect. This highly rebellious act won them few friends.
The cumulative effect of the band’s many ‘outrages’ became clear when the FBI asked for MI5’s co-operation in getting Mick Jagger and Keith Richards charged with drug possession, thus ensuring that they would be denied visas for the U.S. tours which were essential if they were to remain at the top in the music business’

The cumulative effect of all these outrages became clear when the FBI asked for MI5’s co-operation in getting Mick Jagger and Keith Richards charged with drug possession, thus ensuring that they would be denied visas for the U.S. tours which were essential if they were to remain at the top in the music business.

By now MI5 was more than happy to assist in the thwarting of these public menaces, and the detention of David Snyderman at Heathrow Airport presented an opportunity too good to miss. Within a couple of weeks of agreeing to help the secret services, he had somehow become friendly with all the front-line Stones, although he was to prove far from an ideal agent provocateur.

The bait with which he had piqued Keith’s interest in particular was a new Californian-made variety of LSD known as ‘Sunshine’, said to provide a more tranquil and relaxing kind of trip. He duly arrived for that weekend at Redlands with a business-like attaché case containing quantities of the new drug, excessive consumption of which appears to have lowered his own guard.

He kept his cover throughout the Saturday but the following day he almost gave the game away, talking enigmatically to Stones’ photographer Michael Cooper about spying and espionage. ‘He was into the James Bond thing,’ recalls Cooper. ‘You know, the whole CIA bit.’

Fortunately for the Acid King, this was interpreted by the others as so much drug-induced rambling and all remained set for the trap to go ahead.

At around 5pm on the same Sunday afternoon which had found them all on West Wittering beach, a Detective Constable John Challen answered the telephone at West Sussex Police Headquarters in nearby Chichester.

An anonymous male voice, never since identified, informed him that a ‘riotous party’ was going on at Redlands and that drugs were being used.

Like most other regional forces, West Sussex did not have a dedicated drugs squad. The nearest they had to a narcotics expert was a Detective Sergeant Stanley Cudmore, who had recently been diagnosed with a brain tumour and given light office duties while he underwent outpatient treatment.

He had used the time well, reading up on the various illegal substances then said to be circulating in Britain, and was now summoned to join a task force of 18 officers descending on Redlands.
Detective Constable John Challen recalled being momentarily disoriented by the scene in Keith’s living room – the rubble of bottles, ashtrays, guitars, flickering candles and smouldering joss sticks, among which long-haired, long-robed figures of not instantly determinable gender reclined on large Moroccan floor cushions

The occupants did not hear the seven police vehicles draw up outside, or notice anything amiss, until a female detective’s face appeared at the leaded window of the big, high-raftered living room where they all happened to have gathered.

Even then, she was thought to be a Stones fan who, like many before, had got on to Keith’s property without difficulty and would be appeased by a friendly word and an autograph.

After thunderous knocking, the front door was opened to reveal the impressive figure of a Chief Inspector Gordon Dineley.

This was West Sussex’s first drugs raid and he had marked the occasion by wearing his full dress uniform, complete with white-braided peaked cap and military-style cane.

If Mick and the others felt shock and disbelief at the subsequent surge of police officers into the house, the raiders themselves were equally at a loss. None had ever been inside a rock star’s home before.

DC Challen recalled being momentarily disoriented by the scene in Keith’s living room – the rubble of bottles, ashtrays, guitars, flickering candles and smouldering joss sticks, among which long-haired, long-robed figures of not instantly determinable gender reclined on outsize Moroccan floor cushions.

Even Keith’s choice of paintwork to set off the old oak beams, not healthy-minded white or cream distemper but dark matte shades of purple, brown and orange, struck DC Challen as incriminatingly ‘strange’.

But one decorative detail above all mesmerised constable and chief inspector alike.

On returning from the afternoon’s walk to the beach, Marianne Faithfull had gone upstairs for a bath and rejoined the others swathed only in a fur rug pulled from one of the beds.

It was left to Detective Sergeant Cudmore, West Sussex Constabulary’s nearest approach to a sniffer dog, to inhale the air around Marianne for what he alone could recognise as the tell-tale odour of cannabis.

While this was going on, her behaviour was almost tantamount to obstructing a police officer in the course of his duty. From time to time she deliberately let her fur rug slip down around her shoulders, showing ‘portions of her nude body’.

Each of the plain-clothes officers collared an individual house-guest to search while the uniformed element guarded the exits. There was some initial confusion when woman detective constable Evelyn Fuller approached a King’s Road flower child named Nicky Cramer, who wore makeup as well as exotic silk pyjamas, and mistook him for a female.

The first finds were made on Acid King David: a small tin box and an envelope containing what DS Cudmore recognised as cannabis. Yet as the police executed their search warrant to the utmost, rummaging minutely through every cupboard and drawer, the incriminating attaché case somehow lay undisturbed in the middle of the room.

…

By Philip Norman

PUBLISHED: 21:07 GMT, 30 September 2012 | UPDATED: 14:42 GMT, 1 October 2012

Find this story at 1 October 2012

Published by Associated Newspapers Ltd

Part of the Daily Mail, The Mail on Sunday & Metro Media Group
© Associated Newspapers Ltd

The FBI and MI5 Tried to Crush The Rolling Stones and Rock ‘N’ Roll

Take a trip back in time to when two governments(who once hated each other) teamed up in an attempt to assassinate the Rolling Stones‘ career. They attempted to do so before The Rolling Stones could fill the minds of the youth with rock & roll.

The Rolling Stones are celebrating 50 years of rocking, and now Philip Norman writes in his book ‘Mick Jagger’, that the FBI and MI5 plotted against the band. The author alleges the two agencies teamed up after Acid King Dave cooperated in lieu of going to jail. The failing actor, after being busted at Heathrow Airport with drugs, cut a deal with MI5.

Phillip says that led to dealing drugs to the Rolling Stones which turned into the infamous Redlands bust. The idea he claims was all the FBI’s who wanted to keep Keith and Mick off of American soil. Both did jail time, Keith Richards was convicted for allowing marijuana to be smoked at his estate and Mick Jagger for amphetamines.

They still couldn’t keep the Rolling Stones from rocking the U.S., but then guitarist Brian Jones did until his ‘misadventure’ death in 1969.

 

By: Kain | Yesterday
Find this story at 2 October 2012

How the Acid King confessed he DID set up Rolling Stones drug bust for MI5 and FBI

It is one of the most intriguing chapters in the history of the Rolling Stones.

The drugs raid on a party at guitarist Keith Richards’s Sussex home, Redlands, more than 40 years ago very nearly destroyed the band.

And one of the 1967 episode’s unexplained mysteries was the identity of the man blamed by Richards and Mick Jagger for setting them up, a young drug dealer known as the Acid King.

He was a guest at the party – and supplied the drugs – but vanished after the raid, never to be seen or heard of again.

Jagger and Richards were arrested and jailed for possession of cannabis and amphetamines, though later acquitted on appeal.

Richards claimed last week in his autobiography, Life, that the Acid King was a police informant called David Sniderman.

The truth appears to confirm Richards’s long-held belief that the band was targeted by an Establishment fearful of its influence over the nation’s youth.

The Mail on Sunday can reveal that Sniderman was a Toronto-born failed actor who told his family and friends he was recruited by British and American intelligence as part of a plot to discredit the group.

After the Redlands bust, he slipped out of Britain and moved to the States where he changed his name to David Jove, and lived in Hollywood, later working as a small-time producer and film-maker.

Maggie Abbott, a Sixties talent agent, met him in Los Angeles in 1983 and became his lover. He told her how he infiltrated the group but said he was now ‘on the run’.

She said: ‘David was a heavy drug user but had a quick wit. He was the perfect choice to infiltrate the Stones.

‘He never showed any remorse for what he did. It was all about how he had been “the victim”. He was a totally selfish person.

‘Mick had been my friend as well as a client and I thought about trying to persuade David to come clean publicly.

‘But he was always armed with a handgun and I feared that if I gave him away, he’d shoot me.’

His identity was confirmed by a scion of a family of American philanthropists,
James Weinstock.

Two years after the Redlands raid, ‘Dave Jove’ married Mr Weinstock’s sister, Lotus, in Britain.

‘They’d come up with some new way to make acid and decided to go to the UK and sell it,’ Miss Abbott said.

But David was caught carrying pot by Customs.

‘Some other guys turned up – he implied they were MI5 or MI6 – and they gave him an ultimatum: he’d get out of prison time if he set up the Stones.’

The British agents were in cahoots, he told Miss Abbott, with the FBI’s notorious Counterintelligence division, known as Cointelpro, which specialised in discrediting American groups deemed to be ‘subversive’.

On Christmas Day in 1969, ‘Jove’s’ new wife, Lotus, gave birth to a daughter, Lili. Their marriage lasted 18 years, though they never lived together.

‘I first met David when I returned to California from Bali, where I had gone searching for God,’ said James Weinstock, Lotus’s brother.

‘One New Year’s Eve, he showed me a gun and said he’d just killed a man who was messing with his car.’ Later he was rumoured to have murdered a TV personality, Peter Ivers, the presenter of a TV show that ‘Jove’ produced.

Miss Abbott said: ‘There was talk that Peter had decided to leave the show and David was angry. ‘I discovered “Jove” wasn’t David’s real name when he shot himself through his heel with his gun.

‘When we checked him into hospital, he used a made-up name and later I found out his real name was Sniderman.’

His first half-hearted admission was to Mr Weinstock: ‘He told me he was tight with the Rolling Stones in England, but had a falling-out with them,’ he said.

‘He was arrested for some serious offence, but managed to extricate himself, and he said it all looked very suspicious when the police busted the Rolling Stones. They froze him out after that.’

In 1985, Miss Abbott and an old friend, Marianne Faithfull, went out for dinner in Los Angeles.

Miss Abbott introduced her to ‘Jove’ – but Ms Faithfull soon told her she wanted to leave.

Miss Abbott says: ‘When we got into my car, she said, “It’s him, the Acid King. He set up the Redlands bust. Don’t ever see him again”. ’

Miss Abbott added: ‘Two months after the evening with Marianne, I finally had it out with him.
‘To my amazement, he told me everything. He said, “It’s a relief to be able to talk about it”. ’

…

By Sharon Churcher and Peter Sheridan
UPDATED: 13:46 GMT, 24 October 2010

Find this story at 24 October 2010

Published by Associated Newspapers Ltd

Part of the Daily Mail, The Mail on Sunday & Metro Media Group
© Associated Newspapers Ltd

Olympic error: UK government to answer for hiring human rights abuser

The British government is up for questioning from Parliament over why it has handed over the Olympic Games’ security to a company accused of human rights abuses in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories.

The UK-based G4S, which describes itself as the “world’s leading international security solutions group,” was selected as the “official provider of security and cash services for the Olympics.”

Moreover, it has already taken on 10,400 new employees for the 2012 Olympiad.

However, the company’s activities in Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which the UK considers illegal, have raised questions in Westminster.

The matter of fact is that G4S is a known provider of equipment for several Israeli military checkpoints in the occupied West Bank as well as for security systems at the Ofer detention center in Ramallah. That facility houses a jail and a military court, where Palestinian political prisoners, including children, are held and tortured. British Parliament strongly criticized the detention center for human rights abuses in 2010.

G4S also provides equipment to and secures the perimeter of several other Israeli prisons in which prisoners, illegally transferred from Palestinian territories, are held in breach of Article 76 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

It remains unclear how a company with such a questionable reputation could have been chosen to provide security during the London Olympics. G4S seems to be “about the worst you could pick in the world to do this job,” investigative journalist Tony Gosling told RT.

“This is basically the privatization of the British police force. It’s being sucked in by the G4S,” Gosling says. He added that G4S are even “starting to operate police stations, they are also starting to do a lot of civilian support work for the police.”

And, Gosling adds, the company seems to be receiving the UK’s support – in the form of official contracts. “They are bidding for contracts in Birmingham and elsewhere to actually operate detention facilities inside existing police stations.”

G4S already runs six private prisons in the UK, where several hundred detainees are hired for full-time work paying under $3 a day. The privatization of prisons by companies like G4S creates a very dangerous financial incentive to criminalize poor people and “incarcerate them for private profit,” according to Gosling.

The parliamentary grilling next week will be led by Labour peer Lord Hollick. He will prepare questions to the government on Monday concerning steps it has taken to prevent G4S from continued cooperation with Israeli officials in the illegal Jewish settlements.

The move follows recent international condemnation of Israel’s settlement expansion. On May, 7 Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced plans to build another 850 homes in four settlements in the occupied West Bank. New settlements were said to be built to compensate for the “evacuation of 30 apartments” ordered by the Supreme Court.

The British government’s eager cooperation with G4S is in spite of the fact that in September 2011, the firm’s contract to deport migrants from the UK was canceled after it came to light that some 773 complaints of abuse had been filed against it, and following the death of Jimmy Mubenga, an Angolan asylum-seeker who died as a result of being “restrained” by G4S staff.

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Find this story at 10 June 2012

Report of Human Rights Watch 2010

Published: 10 June, 2012, 01:43
Edited: 10 June, 2012, 01:43
© Autonomous Nonprofit Organization “TV-Novosti”, 2005 – 2011. All rights reserved.

Britain faces legal challenge over secret US ‘kill list’ in Afghanistan

Afghan man who lost relatives in missile strike says UK role in supplying information to US military may be unlawful

Britain’s role in supplying information to an American military “kill list” in Afghanistan is being subjected to legal challenge amid growing international concern over targeted strikes against suspected insurgents and drug traffickers.

An Afghan man who lost five relatives in a missile strike started proceedings against the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) and the Ministry of Defence demanding to know details of the UK’s participation “in the compilation, review and execution of the list and what form it takes”.

Legal letters sent to Soca and the MoD state the involvement of UK officials in these decisions “may give rise to criminal offences and thus be unlawful”. They say Britain’s contribution raises several concerns, particularly in cases where international humanitarian laws protecting civilians and non-combatants may have been broken.

“We need to know whether the rule of law is being followed and that safeguards are in place to prevent what could be clear breaches of international law,” said Rosa Curling from the solicitors Leigh Day & Co. “We have a family here that is desperate to know what happened, and to ensure this kind of thing never happens again.”

Targeting Taliban commanders in precision attacks has been an important part of Nato’s strategy in Afghanistan, and it has involved US, British and Afghan special forces, and the use of drones.

But who is put on the “kill list” and why remains a closely guarded secret – and has become a huge concern for human rights groups. They have questioned the legality of such operations and said civilians are often killed.

Soca refused to discuss its intelligence work, but the agency and the MoD said they worked “strictly within the bounds of international law”. Its role in the operation to compile a “kill list” was first explained in a report to the US Senate’s committee on foreign relations.

The report described how a new task force targeting drug traffickers, insurgents and corrupt officials was being set up at Kandahar air field in southern Afghanistan. “The unit will link the US and British military with the DEA [Drug Enforcement Agency], Britain’s Serious and Organised Crime Agency, and police and intelligence agencies from other countries.” The 31-page report from 2009 acknowledged the precise rules of engagement were classified.

But it said two generals in Afghanistan had explained they “have been interpreted to allow them to put drug traffickers with proven links to insurgency on a kill list, called the joint integrated prioritised target list”.

“The military places no restrictions on the use of force with these selected targets, which means they can be killed or captured on the battlefield,” the Senate report said. “It does not, however, authorise targeted assassinations away from the battlefield. The generals said standards for getting on the list require two verifiable human sources and substantial additional evidence.”

The legal challenge has been brought by an Afghan who believes his relatives were unlawfully killed in a case of mistaken identity during one “kill list” operation. A bank worker in Kabul, Habib Rahman lost two brothers, two uncles and his father-in-law in a US missile attack on their cars on 2 September 2010. They had been helping another member of the family who had been campaigning in Takhar province in northern Afghanistan in the runup to the country’s parliamentary elections. In total, 10 Afghans were killed and several others injured.

Rahman says most of those who died were election workers. But the attack was praised by Nato’s International Security and Assistance Force (Isaf) which said the target had been a man in the convoy called Muhammad Amin. The US accused him of being a Taliban commander and member of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, and said the people who had been travelling with him had been insurgents.

A detailed study of the incident by the research group Afghanistan Analysts Network contradicted the official account, saying Isaf had killed Zabet Amanullah. Amin was tracked down after the incident and is still alive, said the study’s author, Kate Clark. “Even now, there does not seem to be any acknowledgment within the military that they may have got the wrong man,” she said. “It is really very bizarre. They think Amin and Amanullah are one and the same.”

Rahman’s lawyers acknowledge they do not know whether information provided by Britain contributed to this attack, but hope the legal challenge will force officials to be more open about the British contribution to the “kill list”.

The letters to Soca’s director general, Trevor Pearce, and the defence secretary, Philip Hammond, point to the Geneva conventions, which say that persons taking no active part in hostilities are protected from “violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds”.

They also draw on the International Committee of the Red Cross, which has said anyone accompanying an organised group who is not directly involved in hostilities “remains civilian assuming support functions”.

The legal letters, the first step towards seeking judicial review, say “drug traffickers who merely support the insurgency financially could not legitimately be included in the list” under these principles. The lawyers believe that, even if Isaf had targeted the right man, it may have been unlawful for others to have been killed in the missile strike.

“The general practice of international forces in Afghanistan and the experience of our client suggest that proximity to a listed target is, on its own, sufficient for an individual to be considered a legitimate target for attack. Such a policy would be unlawful under the international humanitarian law principles,” they say.

Curling said: “Ensuring the UK government and its agencies are operating within their legal obligations could not be more important. Our client’s case suggests the establishment and maintenance of the ‘killing list’ is not in line with the UK’s duties under international humanitarian law. Our client lost five of his relatives in an attack by the international military forces as a result of this list. It is important that the Ministry of Defence and Soca provide us with the reassurances sought.”

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Find this story at 9 August 2012

Nick Hopkins
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 9 August 2012 19.56 BST

© 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

Did police cover up murder of ‘informant’?

Family accuses Met Police of whitewash and racism and awaits result of a third inquiry

Scotland Yard has been accused of a “cover up” after it emerged that its own review into the controversial death of a man believed to be an informant did not address key evidence which suggested officers bungled the investigation.

Kester David, 53, was found burned to death under railway arches in north London two years ago. Police concluded that he had committed suicide, but his family claim that he was murdered, possibly connected to him being a police informant, and that detectives failed to carry out a proper investigation because he was black.

In response, Inspector Brian Casson conducted an internal inquiry into the initial investigation. He found that officers had made a “catalogue of errors” that amounted to “a failing in duty”.

However, The Independent has established that the Met then ordered another review, carried out in March this year by DSI Keith Dobson, which did not address Casson’s findings.

Dobson’s report, obtained by The Independent, says: “I have not discovered anything which would have altered the ‘course and direction’ of the original investigation or alter the conclusions and findings which are documented by the investigators and experts involved…Based on all the information supplied to me I concur with that conclusion.”

Last night Mr David’s brother Roger Griffith described the Dobson report as an attempted “whitewash” by the Met and part of a sustained attempt to cover up the failings of the original detectives, whom he believes were motivated by racism.

He said: “The Dobson report was a cover up which ignored everything Casson found and concluded that the original investigation was a good job. It was a complete whitewash.”

He added: “How is it right that two police officers who failed us so tragically are still on the streets? They seemed hell bent on not investigating and putting forward that it was suicide…The two officers should be suspended now, so that no other mother has to go through what our mum has been put through.”

An inquest into Mr David’s death recorded an open verdict in January 2011 amid unanswered questions and a missing DNA report. After the critical Casson report was leaked to the press, Met Commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe ordered a new inquiry, which is still ongoing.

Inspector Casson, who was investigating the family’s complaints, found two key witnesses who had called 999 with evidence that pointed to foul play, but were never interviewed by the detectives.

One man, who was awake feeding his baby daughter, reported hearing two screams of ‘no’ by a man who sounded panicked, frightened and in pain at 4.20am. He was first interviewed by the Inspector Casson – almost 18 months after the incident.

The second caller was a Morrisson’s supermarket night shift worker who had seen a white Mercedes van in the car park, which borders the Travis Perkin yard where Mr David was found, and two men walking towards the yard at 3.45am. He had never before seen a vehicle in the car park at that time of night. The CCTV footage was never recovered.

Mr David’s burnt body was found without shoes but there was a pair of white Reebok trainers found close-by, which his family said did not belong to him. The detectives concluded that they were his because, they told the coroner, DNA taken from the shoes “would have” belonged to a close relative. This was not true; there is no mention of a close relative in the excerpt of the DNA report quoted by Casson, the same report apparently lost by the detectives so never seen by the coroner or family.

The forensic scientist actually found two DNA profiles, one was dominant so most likely belonged to regular wearer of the shoes, but this was not run against the police DNA database. Casson’s inquiry found that it was perfect match to a white man from the travelling community.

At the inquest, Detective Kirk told the coroner that the CCTV footage showing Mr David buying a canister of petrol a few hour before he is believed to have died, pointed to a planned suicide. The inquest was not shown footage from a few minutes later which showed an RAC van attend as Mr David’s car had broken down because it was out of fuel. This footage was “not discovered” by the original investigation.

Casson also found that crucial mobile phone analysis was not done.

The Casson report recommended “a severity assessment” be conducted in light of his findings. Even the Dobson report recommends they are “considered for local management action” because of the insensitivities shown to the family and the inaccurate information they passed on. But both still remain on full duty.

They family do not understand why the IPCC, which is currently investigating five alleged cases of racism, decided not to get involved pending the outcome of the criminal investigation. The IPCC said it was reviewing this decision following the family’s request not to delay the investigation.

The Met did not comment on Mr Griffith’s view that the Dobson report was a whitewash and an attempt to cover up the actions of racist officers but said: “There is a fresh on-going investigation into the death of Kester David by the Specialist Crime and Operations Directorate (SC&O1)… detectives retain an open mind about the circumstances surrounding the incident.

“An investigation into an unexplained death of this nature is reviewed as a matter of course after 28 days, usually internally, but in this case by an external police force ensure Mr David’s family is as reassured as they can be about the effectiveness of our investigative process.”

She added: “The investigation into this complaint has not been completed… the Directorate of Professional Standards awaits the outcome of the [criminal] investigation. No action has been taken against any officer at this stage. No disciplinary action can be considered until SC&O1 have finalised their investigation.”

Timeline: Kester David Case

7 July 2010 Kester David dies around 4am. His burnt body is found under railway arches of Palmers Green station, north London, at 11am.

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Find this story at 7 July 2012 

Nina Lakhani
Saturday, 7 July 2012

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