THE MURDER of lawyer Rosemary Nelson by loyalists nine years ago was a brutal and cowardly attempt to "remove the chances of reconciliation" at a time of great political change, a public inquiry has heard.
Rory Phillips QC, counsel for the inquiry into the killing, told the first of the public hearings in the case yesterday that discovery of the truth could help secure the path to a better future.
At the core of the case was the suggestion that the British state through its various agencies was in some way involved in the killing of Mrs Nelson in March 1999, less than a year after the historic political breakthrough represented by the Belfast Agreement.
In his opening statement to the inquiry in Belfast, Mr Phillips referred repeatedly to suggestions that the lawyer was murdered because of her work. He said that effective representation of those charged with what he called terrorist crimes was a cornerstone of the justice system.
Mrs Nelson's high-profile work with nationalists and republicans, not least in the context of the Drumcree marching dispute, was perceived to be political and led to great hatred, he said.
Mr Phillips said her murder seemed similar to that of solicitor Pat Finucane some 10 years earlier.
However, it differed significantly in that the murder victim was among many who had voiced fears for her safety before a car bomb took her life.
No one had been charged let alone convicted in connection with the case, Mr Phillips continued, and there had been no public airing of some of the issues central to the case until now.
The task facing the inquiry was to investigate "troubling suggestions" that the state or its agencies played a role in the killing either through its actions or its omissions and that there had been a widespread and long-established conspiracy against Mrs Nelson.
"On your behalf it will be our task over the months of these hearings to investigate and probe these and other matters which include very troubling suggestions - at their highest of state involvement in the murder of one of the state's own citizens - in a dispassionate and calm way so that the truth is not itself obscured by emotion, preconception or prejudice," he said.
To establish the truth the inquiry would hear evidence from a witness list running to more than 100 names.
This would include senior intelligence and security force personnel.
Further evidence would be gleaned from more than 300 witness statements which the inquiry had also gathered since it was established in 2004.
Mr Phillips said the inquiry would focus its work under 29 headings.
Broadly, these would cover questions as to whether or not the murdered lawyer had been of interest to the intelligence services and other state agencies working in Northern Ireland in the 1990s and whether this in turn affected the level of protection she was afforded.
In attempting to answer these, the inquiry would be given details from dozens of statements provided by those in the intelligence community and the police as well as the British army at the time.
These submissions were among a "huge number of papers and other pieces of evidence" which had been gathered.
However, Mr Phillips insisted that the task before the inquiry was to keep these issues in perspective. To do so would be to keep to what he called the "right path" through all the documents to where the truth could be found.
To that end Mr Phillips began to sketch out to the inquiry the political context in Northern Ireland at the time Mrs Nelson's legal work came to prominence. He recalled the political contacts between the Irish and British governments at the time of the Downing Street Declaration in 1993 and later at the agreement of the Framework Documents which laid the basis for the ceasefires and for the eventual agreement concluded on Good Friday 1998.
He referred to the escalating trouble over Drumcree, to the significance of paramilitary decommissioning and the emergence of so-called dissident groups on loyalist and republican wings.
The counsel's opening statement will continue, and will develop this theme, when the inquiry reconvenes this morning. Mr Phillips is expected to conclude his statement by the end of the week with the first public witness being called on April 28th.