The former head of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) today denied withholding information about a controversial murder inquiry from a former Northern Ireland Secretary.
Former RUC chief constable Sir Ronnie Flanagan said there had been no rift with Mo Mowlam over the death of Robert Hamill, a 25-year-old Catholic beaten to death by a loyalist mob in the centre of Portadown, Co Armagh, in April 1997.
He told the Belfast-based Hamill Inquiry a tip-off that one of the officers at the centre of the probe told a suspect to destroy evidence had not been withheld from the late Northern Ireland secretary.
Sir Ronnie said: “I had a very good working relationship with the Secretary of State. She was a very different person from her predecessor (Patrick Mayhew) but she and I got on extremely well personally and I had every respect for that and there was no way that I would have deliberately withheld information from her.
“There is no way I would have rejected her as having an anti-RUC agenda.”
The Hamill Inquiry was established to examine if armed RUC officers near the scene at the time of the murder could or should have done more to prevent it.
Sir Ronnie, giving evidence via video link, was appearing following allegations from the Hamill family’s lawyers that his reputation had been damaged because of how he engaged in the police investigation.
He was asked by counsel for the inquiry Ashley Underwood QC whether he had backed investigating officer Detective Chief Superintendent Maynard McBurney in slowly probing aspects of the case.
Sir Ronnie said he was totally committed to solving the crime and had confidence in his investigating officer. Mr Underwood put a scenario to Sir Ronnie.
“Dr Mowlam takes an interest in the family, and in some quarters perhaps followed through an agenda which was antagonistic towards the RUC, and Rosemary Nelson (a murdered solicitor) acting for the Hamill sisters,” he said.
“It was not in the interests of the force to give those two people details of this tip-off allegation.”
Sir Ronnie denied that and said his only intention was to ensure that the investigation progressed and that the killers were caught.
He added it was natural for a Northern Ireland secretary with security responsibilities to take an interest in a murder investigation.
“Dr Mowlam was a very human person and the fact is she would be extremely sympathetic to a bereaved family, it isn’t a surprise to me,” he added.
Charles Adair QC, representing police in a Land Rover near the scene of the murder who were accused of not doing enough, said: “The Land Rover crew (which was not involved in the tip-off allegation) have been the subject of vilification and the wildest allegations,” he said.
“Not once, the evidence now having been gathered, the witnesses now having been called, has there been a hint of suggestion that the Land Rover crew did what they did because it was a Catholic being attacked.
“It is because there’s not a shred of evidence that whatever they did or didn’t do was in any way related to fact that Robert Hamill was a Catholic.”
PA