Britain is embroiled in a scandal over a top-secret army unit that directed murder squads in Northern Ireland in the 1980s.
Strong evidence has emerged that British army officers directed and gave intelligence to Protestant gang leaders who killed Catholic civilians.
Many of those killed had nothing to do with the underground Irish Republican Army, which was fighting for independence for Northern Ireland.
London’s Guardian newspaper published a riveting account last week of a man who watched with his family as his father was shot 14 times at the dinner table by Protestant gunmen.
Michael Finucane said evidence shows the British army knew his dad’s 1989 assassination was about to happen and did nothing to stop it. A British-run informant was one of the gunmen, Finucane said.
“I can still remember it clearly,” he wrote. “It is an image seared into my mind. The thing I remember most vividly is the noise; the reports of each bullet reverberating in the kitchen, how my grip on my younger brother and sister tightened with every shot.”
Finucane’s father Patrick was a lawyer who criticized the government for human-rights abuses in Northern Ireland.
