The brother of a man shot dead by the IRA says he has lost “faith” in the British state to deliver the truth after it emerged that MI5 failed to disclose hundreds of pages of information from an investigation into the agent known as Stakeknife.
Fran Mulhern spoke out after the head of Operation Kenova, Sir Iain Livingstone, voiced “great concern” that the spy agency failed to hand over hundreds of pages including “significant new information”.
His brother Joseph Mulhern was abducted and killed by the IRA in 1993 and it was claimed that he was an informer.
His father Frank later said he was given an account of his son’s death by senior IRA man and British army agent Freddie Scappaticci.
In 2016 Operation Kenova was set up to investigate the activities of the notorious agent known as Stakeknife - who was identified as Scappaticci in 2003.
He was a former commander of the IRA’s Internal Security Unit (ISU), which hunted down and killed informers and agents.
Scappaticci worked for the Force Research Unit, an intelligence gathering branch of the British army and is said to have died of natural causes last year.
In March this year Operation Kenova published a detailed interim report with a final document expected to be released next year.
It has now emerged that hundreds of pages of information were not provided to the investigation team before the interim document was made public.
In a recent letter to Secretary of State Hilary Benn, Mr Livingstone said the new material “does appear to cast doubt on some of the documents and witness evidence obtained by Kenova and some statements made in the interim report”.
Mr Livingstone added the new disclosure raises questions about some of the information contained in the interim report, including about when MI5 say they became aware of Stakeknife’s existence.
In a statement the British government has claimed the new information was discovered during the process of “digitising wider historical records”.
Mr Mulhern said the revelations have crushed his confidence, describing them as “super disappointing” adding they will “delay the (final) report now”.
“I think I’ve lost faith completely in the Security Services and the state when it comes to disclosure, and the court case dad started before he died is moving disgracefully slowly with no end in sight either,” he said.
Mr Mulhern’s solicitor Kevin Winters, of KRW Law, said the latest revelations “won’t come as any real shock” to the 20 Operation Kenova families he represents.
“After all these years they are well conditioned to a drip feed exposure of state cover up of which this is the latest example,” he said.
“It chimes with the recent obstructive interventionist stance taken in the judicial review cases of Sean Brown and Paul Thompson.”
SDLP Policing Board member Mark H Durkan described the development as “shocking”.
Sinn Féin MP John Finucane described the revelations as “disgraceful and unsurprising”.
