TRAPPED IN A MASONIC WORLD

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British Army and Royal Ulster Constabulary [RUC] were accused of operating a Shoot-to-Kill policy,
under which suspects were alleged to have been deliberately killed without any attempt to arrest them.
Such a policy was alleged to have been directed almost exclusively at suspected or actual members of Irish
republican paramilitary groups. The Special Air Service [SAS] is the most high-profile of the agencies
that were accused of employing this policy, as well as other British Army regiments and the RUC.
Notable incidents alleging the use of the Shoot-to-Kill policy include Loughgall, Gibraltar and Strabane.
The SAS killed a total of fourteen Provisional Irish Republican Army [IRA] and Irish National Liberation
Army [INLA] members at these locations. Other high-profile incidents involving alleged Shoot-to-Kill
incidents occurred in Belfast, Derry, East Tyrone and South Armagh. The killing of Ulster Volunteer
Force [UVF] member Brian Robinson by undercover army officers is notable for being the most prominent
of the very few alleged shoot to kill incidents where the victim was a loyalist. [3]
On the 24th May 1984 an inquiry under Deputy Chief Constable John Stalker of the Greater
Manchester Police was opened into three specific cases where it was alleged that a specially trained
undercover RUC team known as the Headquarters Mobile Support Unit had carried out a Shoot-to-Kill
policy. These three cases were in the book Stalker, published by Mr Stalker in 1988, the following
descriptions of his investigation into the three shooting incidents appeared, concerning the McKerr, Toman
and Burns shooting: - The Stalker Inquiry discovered that the three victims of the shooting had been under
surveillance for many hours by the police who planned to intercept them at a place different from where
the killings occurred. No serious attempt to attract the attention of the driver was made, and no policeman
was struck by the car. Immediately after the incident the police officers drove from the scene with their
weapons and returned to their base for a debriefing by senior Special Branch Officers. Officers from the
Criminal Investigation Department [CID] were denied access for many days to the police officers involved
and to their car, clothes and weapons for forensic examination. On the night of the killings, CID officers
were given incorrect information about where the shootings began and part of the forensic examination
was conducted in the wrong place. Many cartridge cases of rounds fired were never found.
Stalker wrote; - ―We believed... that at least one officer had been in an entirely different position from
that which he had claimed to be in when some fatal shots were fired. I also established that the police
pursuit took place in a different manner from that described. But most damning of all, almost 21 months
after the shooting we found fragments of the bullet that undoubtedly killed the driver still embedded in the
car. That crucial evidence had lain undiscovered by the RUC and Forensic Science service... My
conclusion in relation to the missing cartridge cases was that as many as twenty were deliberately
removed from the scene. I could only presume that this was in order to mislead the forensic scientists and
to hide the true nature and extent of the shooting. I had to regard the investigation of the matter as
slipshod and in some aspects woefully inadequate. I was left with two alternative conclusions, either that
some RUC detectives were amateur and inefficient at even the most basic of murder investigation routines;
or that they had been deliberately inept‖.
Concerning the three incidents as a whole, Stalker wrote: ―Even though six deaths had occurred over a
five week period... and involved in each case officers from the same specialist squad, no co-ordinated
investigation had ever been attempted. It seemed that the investigating officers had never spoken to each
other. Worse still, despite the obvious political and public implications, no senior officer had seen fit to
draw the reports together. We had expected a particularly high level of enquiry in view of the nature of
the deaths, but this was shamefully absent. The files were little more than a collection of statements,
apparently prepared for a coroner‘s enquiry. They bore no resemblance to my idea of a murder
prosecution file. - Even on the most cursory of readings I could see clearly why the prosecutions had
failed‖.
Some of the victim‘s families have won compensation from the Ministry of Defence following cases
brought to the European Court of Human Rights against the British government. The European judges
considered four separate cases between 1982 and 1992 in which 14 people were killed. They involved the
deaths of twelve IRA members and two civilians [one a Sinn Féin member] at the hands of the SAS, the
RUC and the loyalist Ulster Defence Association [UDA], allegedly acting in collusion with the RUC. In
the judgement the court ruled that: ―Eight armed IRA men shot dead by soldiers of an undercover SAS unit
at Loughgall, County Armagh, in 1987, and two IRA men killed by RUC officers, had their human rights
violated‖. It said this had arisen because of the failure of the state authorities to conduct a proper
investigation into the circumstances of the deaths. A similar finding was brought in the case of Sinn Féin
member Patrick Shanaghan, who was killed by loyalist paramilitaries. The findings were brought under