Palm print and tied hands hinder inquest
Posted By: June 10, 2016
Newton Emerson. Irish News (Belfast). Thursday, June 9, 2016
There is a striking inconsistency in the PSNI’s position towards The Irish News and the Kingsmill massacre.
Last Friday night, into the early hours of Saturday morning, a crown solicitor acting for the chief constable tried to stop this newspaper publishing an interview with Omagh bomber Colm Murphy, who has just been linked to Kingsmill by a palm print.
The chief constable’s objection was that naming Murphy would “hinder” the Kingsmill investigation.
Yet the day before, the PSNI was claiming it had only uncovered the palm print link thanks to newspaper coverage of the Kingsmill inquest, which inspired a forensic officer to run the print through a database, finding a match that had somehow eluded all his colleagues for 40 years.
So details in the media would hinder an investigation that only details in the media had made possible?
A print match and a suspect’s name are not the same details, of course. Identifying suspects who have not been charged with any offence is a matter of considerable controversy between police and the press, becoming more so since the Leveson Inquiry examined the case of Bristol landlord Christopher Jeffries, effectively tried and convicted by the tabloids of a murder he had nothing to do with.
Uncharged suspects named by the media can bring a civil case for defamation, while the UK government has also considered making it a criminal offence. In 2011, Conservative attorney general Dominic Grieve proposed that journalists who identify uncharged suspects should face six months in jail.
However, all these concerns are entirely based on protecting the privacy and reputation of the suspect. Murphy voluntarily surrendered his privacy by agreeing to be interviewed and has no reputation to defame, having been found responsible by a civil court for the deaths of 29 people. That meant there was no legal issue with naming him, forcing the PSNI to complain about a hindrance to its investigation – a complaint that was strange enough on its own, given that it had no basis in law. But the real question it raises is ‘what investigation?’
The PSNI says it re-opened the Kingsmill case two weeks ago – one week before the start of the inquest – after a forensics officer used his own initiative to match the palm print.
This is not a completely implausible turn of events. The PSNI has a new legacy and justice department, established five months ago, where hunches can be raised. Even the latest biometric databases do not match prints automatically. The Historical Enquiries Team (HET) highlighted how police records had been stored on a series of incompatible computers over the past 40 years.
But this only deepens the mystery of how HET missed the print match when it reviewed the Kingsmill evidence in 2011. Three years later, HET wrote to Kingsmill relatives to apologise for a mix-up in its analysis of ballistics reports, explaining that this error came to light “while conducting inquiries for the coroner’s office” to prepare for the current inquest. So there have been years of re-reviewing the evidence, only for the print match to surface just in time to threaten the inquest.
An inquest may have to be halted if new evidence could lead to a homicide-related charge. Stopping inquests and newspapers has been the only function of this palm print to date. But how plausible is a Kingsmill conviction? Operation Yewtree, relating to 1970s sexual abuse, showed that 40-year-old crimes can be successfully pursued. Ironically, it also involved police identifying suspects before they were charged, specifically because the offences were so far in the past. Officers hoped that revealing names would jog memories and perhaps consciences. This comparison may be a bit of a stretch with Troubles cases but it is not enough of a stretch to explain midnight trips to Belfast High Court to rip a paper off the presses.
Murphy’s explanation for the palm print is that the PSNI is setting him up to protect Sinn Féin. Two days before his Irish News interview, Murphy’s name was linked to a slightly different theory on a prominent loyalist blog, which claimed the print match was revealed to warn him to keep quiet. Once the blog identified Murphy, he felt obliged to defend himself with an interview.
Personally, I would not take anything republican bombers or loyalist bloggers say on trust. But who can be trusted to investigate their claims?
The media has some of the cleanest hands, which is why official attempts to tie its hands are doubly disturbing.
newton@irishnews.com
