The DUP’s Ian Paisley Jnr was chairman of the committee that approved sending a senior PSNI officer to train Libyan police, a move that has angered victims of IRA violence.
It was revealed today that the Policing Board approved the trip by a Superintendent seconded to the National Policing Improvement Agency and that it was board and Stormont Assembly member Ms Paisley who had the final say.
Mr Paisley was chairman of the board’s Human Resources committee when the request came in from the Foreign Office last December.
A board spokesman said because it was not due to meet until February, procedure was followed and the secondment to Libya approved by Mr Paisley, the committee’s independent chairwoman Rosaleen Moore and the board’s then chairman, Sir Desmond Rea. It was then rubber-stamped by Northern Ireland Secretary Shaun Woodward.
However, Mr Paisley tonight defended his decision. He said there were reasons he could not discuss in public but that it was not hard to understand why it would be useful to have an officer with intelligence skills in Libya bringing back information.
The superintendent went to Libya on January 12th this year and left the country on February 2nd. He was back in Northern Ireland before the committee met again in February.
The Policing Board and the PSNI insisted all procedures had been properly followed in the decision-making process.
The PSNI said their officer was on secondment to the National Policing Improvement Agency when the Foreign Office made a request for a “specifically skilled officer”.
It said it was satisfied all appropriate processes were followed and approval received. “At all times the Police Service acted in an open and transparent manner,” said a statement.
Mr Woodward insisted there had been nothing unusual about the PSNI being asked
to help abroad. “Secondments are time-limited and specify the support to be offered. All the legislative requirements were met in the case of the recent secondment to Libya,” he said.
That did little to assuage politicians, include some of those within the Democratic Unionist Party.
North Belfast DUP MP Nigel Dodds said what had happened was “totally inappropriate and offensive given the very recent history of what the Libyans have done in terms of the annals of terrorism in Northern Ireland”.
Mr Dodds is part of a cross-party delegation of MPs travelling to Libya in October to press Colonel Gadafy’s regime for compensation for IRA victims. He said those who made the decision to send the officer were “living in a different world and a different planet” if they thought it the right way to proceed.
William Frazer of victims group FAIR (Families Acting for Innocent Relatives) said he was dumbfounded. “Here we have the police out training the people who trained the IRA and supplied the weapons to murder their colleagues, it’s just unbelievable,” he said.
With the Libyan government facing demands for compensation for relatives of IRA victims, some members of the Northern Ireland Policing Board said they were stunned.
Basil McCrea, an Ulster Unionist Policing Board member and MLA, said he was shocked. “I cannot believe we have been sending officers to a country which has been responsible for so much death and destruction,” he said.