THE SON of an RUC officer murdered by the IRA almost 20 years ago has called for a public inquiry into the killing after the North's Police Ombudsman found that there were flaws in the initial police investigation.
Police Ombudsman Al Hutchinson ruled that the 1988 murder of off-duty police officer John Larmour in a Belfast ice-cream parlour was not properly investigated.
The victim's son, Gavin, queried whether the investigation failed because RUC Special Branch was protecting an IRA informer. He said that at very best the inadequate nature of the original inquiry constituted "gross negligence if not criminal misconduct". He believed that under standards applied by the Stevens Inquiry team into controversial killings, this amounted to "collusion".
Mr Larmour was shot dead in Barnum's shop, a popular ice cream parlour on the Lisburn Road in south Belfast, in October 1988. He was off-duty at the time, helping out his brother who owned the shop.
The murder caused outrage at the time, as local SDLP politician Carmel Hanna yesterday recalled. She said that two men carried out the shooting and that two customers were injured in the attack. Ms Hanna also remembered how the poet Michael Longley, who lives nearby, wrote a "powerful and poignant poem" about the murder called The Ice-Cream Man.
"Even after 19 years, Constable Larmour's killers must be exposed, tried and those who protected them must also face justice," she said. "It is becoming clearer by the day how dirty and sordid was the 'armed struggle' and the Troubles generally and how corrupt were those who participated in killing people."
The Police Ombudsman carried out the inquiry after Mr Larmour complained that the RUC did not carry out "even the most basic investigation" into his father's murder. Mr Larmour made a number of detailed allegations about the quality of the inquiry, which included that police did not act on information available to them following the attack.
Mr Hutchinson found that the investigation "was not thorough and that not all information available to police was passed to the detectives investigating the killing".
"We accept that the information was not necessarily evidence, but it could have led to evidential opportunities which should have been explored by the police. It did not happen in this case, as the police officers investigating the murder were never made aware of all the information available," said a spokesman for the ombudsman.
"More thoroughness would have been expected in relation to follow-up inquiries concerning witnesses, suspects, telephone calls and vehicles thought to have been used in the attack. Some of these inquiries were either not started or not completed," he added.
Mr Larmour said there must now be a public inquiry into the killing. A PSNI spokesman said the Historical Enquiries Team was currently "working on the case" and had been in contact with members of his family "to update them on developments".
The team had also met Mr Hutchinson.