I found the timing strange given the recent rapprochement:
"BC’s Irish project leads to arrest of Gerry Adams" by Mark Arsenault, Zachary T. Sampson and Jeremy C. Fox | Globe staff and Globe correspondents May 01, 2014
Police in Northern Ireland arrested Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams Wednesday in connection with an infamous 42-year-old slaying, based on allegations contained in taped interviews recorded for a Boston College history project on the conflict in Northern Ireland.
A law enforcement official from Belfast said Adams was being questioned, but has not been charged, in the killing of Jean McConville, a mother of 10 who was abducted in west Belfast in 1972. The Irish Republican Army later took responsibility for killing McConville, whom they suspected of being an informant.
Related: Real Terror in Ireland
In a statement Wednesday night, Adams insisted he is innocent and portrayed his arrest as a voluntary arrangement with police. He is a member of the Irish Parliament and president for three decades of the Sinn Fein political party, and played a major role in the 1998 peace agreement.
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The Boston link to the McConville murder has in recent years become a touchstone in debates about academic freedom.
For BC’s Belfast Project, researchers Ed Moloney, a journalist, and Anthony McIntyre, a former IRA volunteer, recorded interviews with members of militia groups that clashed during the Irish Troubles, a conflict between those who would unite Northern Ireland with the Republic of Ireland and those who wanted it to remain within the United Kingdom.
Participants in the BC project have implicated Adams in the killing: Brendan Hughes, a legendary IRA volunteer who fell out with Adams over the latter’s peace strategy that included compromising on long-standing republican ideals; and Dolours Price, one of the highest-profile female members of the Provisional IRA, who said that Adams ordered her to drive McConville to her IRA executioners.
Another alleged BC project participant, Ivor Bell, a former senior IRA commander, was charged in March with aiding and abetting McConville’s killing.
Participants in the history project had agreed to interviews with the understanding that their statements would be confidential until their deaths.
But in 2011, federal prosecutors issued subpoenas for interviews with Hughes, who had died in 2008, and Price, who was then alive but died in 2013.
Boston College turned over materials concerning Hughes. It initially fought the release of the Price recordings but ultimately turned them over to British authorities.
A second subpoena was later issued for “any and all” interviews that contained information about McConville’s death. A federal appeals court ruled in 2013 that 11 interviews had to be released.
Moloney said the arrest of Adams was inevitable after Belfast authorities questioned a number of people about McConville’s death in the last couple of months.
“It was no surprise that this has happened; in fact, I was surprised that it had taken so long,” Moloney said Wednesday in a telephone interview.
As for other men and women interviewed by authorities recently about McConville’s death, Moloney said they would have been in their early teens at the time of the killing, too young for the IRA to have trusted them with significant roles.
“The PSNI seem to be plowing fairly sparse ground,” said Moloney.
Adams’s name nevertheless carries significant weight and changes the tenor of the investigation, Moloney said, though he doubts the head of Sinn Féin will face charges.
“It’s going to be very difficult to level a charge against him, because all the evidence is indirect,” Moloney said.
The greater issue for Moloney is that surrender of the oral history tapes will chill similar research in the future.
“The damage is done,” he said. “The whole process of conducting academic research in the United States of America on sensitive subjects with confidential sources has been dealt a death blow by the Obama Department of Justice.”
And it's NSA.
He later added: “It’s a disaster in Ireland, as well, because it means people are not now willing to sit down in front of a tape recorder and tell the truth about what happened.”
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In Massachusetts, US Attorney Carmen M. Ortiz also declined to comment.
In a recorded statement, a spokesman for the Police Service of Northern Ireland confirmed the arrest, without naming Adams, and confirmed that the questioning was voluntary.
Adams, in his statement, condemned what was done to McConville.
“I believe that the killing of Jean McConville and the secret burial of her body was wrong and a grievous injustice to her and her family,” he said. “Well publicized, malicious allegations have been made against me. I reject these.”
Mary Lou McDonald, Sinn Fein’s deputy leader, attributed the timing of Adams’s arrest — and the entire investigation into McConville’s killing — to politics.
“This latest decision by the PSNI is politically motivated and designed to damage Gerry Adams and Sinn Fein,” said McDonald.
The law enforcement official from Belfast insisted that politics played no role in the process; the source also said it was Adams who chose to make the arrest public.
The arrest comes at an especially sensitive time for Sinn Fein, just weeks before local elections and elections for the European Parliament in which Sinn Fein is expected to fare well.
I'm sensing a politically-motivated show.
The Irish Republican Army acknowledged in 1999 killing McConville; her remains were found in 2003.
McConville was accused by the IRA of feeding information about their operations to the British Army.
The IRA said it was after she ignored their warnings that they abducted her, executed her, and buried her body in a secret grave just over the border in the Irish Republic.
At least the Nigerians just marry theirs (at only $9 a head?).
The police ombudsman of Northern Ireland rejected the IRA assertions in an investigation, after her body was recovered from a beach in County Louth in 2003.
McConville’s children, the youngest being 6 years old at the time of her abduction, were split up in a series of foster homes.
After Bell’s recent arrest, Helen McKendry, one of McConville’s daughters, told the Belfast Telegraph she hoped Adams would face arrest, saying, “I’ll see you in court, too, Gerry Adams.”
I wouldn't count on it.
She could not be reached for comment Wednesday.
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The story then twinkled out for me a bit; sorry for the inconvenience.
"N. Ireland police given 2 more days to question Gerry Adams; Sinn Fein decries extra detainment" by Shawn Pogatchnik | Associated Press May 03, 2014
BELFAST, Northern Ireland — Northern Ireland police were granted an extra 48 hours on Friday to interrogate Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams about the 1972 IRA killing of a Belfast widow, infuriating his Irish nationalist party and raising questions about the stability of the province’s Catholic-Protestant government.
Think of it as a parole.
The Police Service of Northern Ireland confirmed its detectives received permission at a closed-door hearing with a judge to detain Adams for up to two more days. Had the request been refused, authorities would have been required to charge Adams or release him Friday night, two days after his arrest in the abduction, slaying, and secret burial of Jean McConville, a mother of 10. The new deadline is Sunday, although this too could be extended with judicial permission.
The unexpectedly long detention of Adams left senior party colleagues seething. Sinn Fein warned it could end its support for law and order in Northern Ireland — a key peacemaking commitment that enabled the creation of a unity government seven years ago — if Adams is charged.
Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness, the Sinn Fein official who governs Northern Ireland alongside British Protestant politicians, said his party would reconsider its 2007 vote to recognize the legitimacy of Northern Ireland’s police if Adams isn’t freed without charge. Protestants required that commitment before agreeing to cooperate with Sinn Fein.
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Moderate politicians criticized Sinn Fein for making unreasonable threats.
The justice minister in Northern Ireland’s five-party government, David Ford, told journalists outside the police station where Adams was being held that detectives were just doing their jobs in investigating one of the most heinous crimes of the conflict. Without specifying any of his government colleagues, Ford said some were seeking to promote instability.
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Were Sinn Fein to withdraw its support for law and order, it would offer a green light to today’s still-active IRA factions to increase attacks on police. It also would risk the Protestant side’s withdrawal from the power-sharing government, which would force the Northern Ireland Assembly to be dissolved for an emergency election.
Adams, who as Sinn Fein chief since 1983 is Europe’s longest-serving party leader, denies any role in the IRA. But IRA veterans who spoke on tape to a Boston College-commissioned oral history project said he was the outlawed group’s Belfast commander in 1972 and ordered the killing and secret burial of McConville, whom the IRA branded a British army spy.
McConville’s eldest daughter, who has led a two-decade campaign for the truth, says she’s praying for a murder charge — and is prepared to name publicly those IRA members she believes stormed into their home on the day of her mother’s abduction. Her other siblings say they’re too afraid to take this step because it could inspire IRA attacks on themselves or their children.
‘‘What are they going to do to me? They have done so much to me in the last 42 years. Are they going to come and put a bullet in my head? Well, they know where I live,’’ Helen McKendry said.
The underground army killed nearly 1,800 people — including scores of Catholic civilians and IRA members branded spies and informers — before calling a 1997 cease-fire so Sinn Fein could pursue peace with Britain and Northern Ireland’s Protestant majority.
Adams initially insisted in brief face-to-face meetings with McKendry that the IRA wasn’t involved, but pledged to look into it. Finally in 1999, the IRA admitted responsibility for the slayings of nine long-vanished civilians and IRA members, including McConville, and offered to pinpoint her unmarked grave 60 miles south of Belfast in the Republic of Ireland.
That effort failed despite extensive digging. Then in 2003, a dog walker stumbled across her remains, with its bullet-shattered skull, protruding from a bluff above a different beach.
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"Belfast police press to prove Gerry Adams had role in IRA" by Shawn Pogatchnik | Associated Press May 04, 2014
BELFAST — Northern Ireland police are casting a wider net in their efforts to prove that Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams once commanded the outlawed Irish Republican Army and ordered the 1972 killing of a Belfast mother of 10, according to party colleagues and retired militants.
Details of an expanding trawl for evidence emerged Saturday as detectives spent a fourth day questioning Adams about the IRA’s abduction, killing, and secret burial of Jean McConville 42 years ago — an investigation that has infuriated his IRA-linked party.
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Sinn Fein’s deputy leader, Martin McGuinness, said he had been told by Adams’s legal team that detectives were questioning him about many of his speeches, writings, and public appearances going back to the 1970s, when he was interned without trial as an IRA suspect and wrote a newspaper column from prison using the pen name ‘‘Brownie.’’
Sinn Fein has said most of the detectives’ questions being posed to Adams concerned allegations made by IRA veterans in a Boston College-commissioned oral history project.
McGuinness, a former IRA commander who today is the senior Catholic in Northern Ireland’s unity government, told a street rally in Catholic west Belfast that police would fail to prove IRA membership claims against Adams, as last happened in 1978, when Adams was arrested in the wake of a hotel firebomb that burned 12 Protestants to death.
‘‘That case was based on hearsay, gossip, and newspaper articles. It failed then, and it will fail now,’’ McGuinness said in front of a newly painted mural of a smiling Adams beside the words, ‘‘Peacemaker Leader Visionary.’’
Nothing new there. Three great tastes that go great together in a propaganda pre$$.
Supporters at the rally — which took place across the road from the site of McConville’s abduction — held signs showing Adams meeting Nelson Mandela in South Africa.
So that somehow absolves him, meeting with Mandela does?
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200 miles to the south, in the Republic of Ireland, an IRA veteran who served 31 years in prison for killing a policeman said a Northern Ireland detective knocked on his door seeking a witness statement. Peter Rogers, 69, said he refused.
Last month Rogers told the BBC he met both Adams and McGuinness in Dublin in 1980 to discuss their plans to smuggle stolen mining explosives from the Irish Republic to England for use in the IRA’s bombing campaign on London. Rogers said Adams was annoyed because he had failed to deliver them by ferry across the Irish Sea.
Rogers said he told Adams and McGuinness that the explosives were unstable and could detonate while being transported. He said Adams rejected his concerns.
‘‘Gerry said: ‘Look Peter, we can’t replace that explosive. You will have to go with what you have, and as soon as you can get it across, the better’ . . . I was given a direct order,’’ Rogers told the BBC.
Rogers, who in 1972 had escaped from a Royal Navy ship in Belfast used as a temporary prison to hold IRA suspects, was trying to move the explosives in October 1980 when two policemen stopped his van. He fatally shot one of the officers.
Before his Wednesday arrest, Adams rejected Rogers’s statements as false. Adams has always maintained he was never an IRA member.
According to every credible history of the modern Sinn Fein-IRA movement, he joined the outlawed group in 1966 and rose quickly through the ranks, becoming its Belfast commander in 1972, when he took part in the IRA’s first face-to-face truce negotiations with British government leaders in London.
British authorities have struggled to convict senior IRA figures of membership in an outlawed organization, a charge that carries a maximum five-year sentence. To be successful, prosecutions of IRA members usually require forensic evidence or witness testimony.
Commanders plan attacks but do not handle weaponry themselves to avoid creating forensic links. And people willing to testify against the IRA are rare.
Northern Ireland police successfully sued in US courts to get the audiotaped accounts from the Boston College project for use against Adams and others allegedly involved in the McConville slaying....
Reflecting Sinn Fein anger at police use of the Boston tapes, graffiti appeared Saturday in Catholic west Belfast denouncing those IRA veterans who talked as ‘‘touts’’ and ‘‘informers’’ — accusations that typically mean an IRA death sentence.
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"Police release Gerry Adams without charges; Officials review testimonies taken by Boston College" by Steven Erlanger | New York Times May 05, 2014
LONDON — Gerry Adams’s departure from the interrogation center in Antrim, west of Belfast, was delayed two hours by Protestant demonstrators outside the front gate, the Associated Press reported. The protesters waved Union Jack flags and held placards demanding justice for IRA victims. They roared angrily as police armored vehicles came into view.
Police officers, many in riot gear and flame-retardant suits, confronted the Protestants, many of whom covered their faces, as they tried to block Adams’s exit by sitting on the road. After a 15-minute standoff, police escorted Adams out via a rear exit.
Went out the back door, literally.
Prosecutors could choose to prosecute Adams later, even just on charges of being an IRA member. But that charge alone after so many years would be widely seen by Sinn Fein and its allies as political interference.
Adams, a former member of the British Parliament from West Belfast and a current member of the Irish Parliament, the Dail, from County Louth, has led Sinn Fein since 1983. The party is running well in the Irish Republic ahead of elections later this month for local councils and for the European Parliament.
That is what all this was, all right.
The police and officials from Britain, Northern Ireland, and Ireland have all rejected accusations from Sinn Fein and McGuinness that the arrest of Adams was political in nature and stemmed from a “dark side” of the current Police Service of Northern Ireland.
But, not surprisingly, the arrest has produced tension within the power-sharing government of Northern Ireland. The first minister, Peter Robinson of the Democratic Unionist Party, speaking of “republican bullyboy tactics,” accused Sinn Fein of trying to blackmail the police.
Sounds like our Republicans.
He called McGuinness’s threat to reassess Sinn Fein’s support for the police if Adams were charged “a despicable, thuggish attempt to blackmail” the police.
The Democratic Unionists agreed to share power with Sinn Fein so long as the latter accepted the authority of the reformed Ulster police.
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Related: BC will return its interviews on Ireland
Another back down:
"UK rejects new probe into 1971 Belfast killings" Associated Press April 30, 2014
DUBLIN — Britain announced Tuesday that it will not order a fact-finding probe into the 1971 killing of 10 Belfast Catholics, including a priest, by British troops during a three-day street confrontation, a decision that infuriated relatives of the dead.
I guess the stereotype of angry Irish is true -- not that they do not have good reason.
The relatives have lobbied for an investigation similar to the one that explored 1972’s Bloody Sunday, when troops shot dead 13 Catholic demonstrators in another city, Londonderry. That 12-year probe concluded the soldiers killed unarmed civilians, not armed IRA members.
Related: Ireland Fit For a Queen
Britain’s secretary of state for Northern Ireland, Theresa Villiers, said Britain did not believe a probe ‘‘would provide answers which are not already in the public domain or covered by existing legal processes.’’ She noted Northern Ireland’s attorney general already had ordered new coroner’s court investigations, a three-year-old process that has yet to produce any findings.
A coroner’s court gathers evidence of the cause of death, including the nature of the gunshot wounds. A fact-finding inquiry would be much wider and include witness statements from the now retired soldiers who opened fire.
The carnage in the Irish Republican Army stronghold of Ballymurphy, west Belfast, came as Britain launched raids across Catholic districts of Northern Ireland to arrest and imprison hundreds of IRA members. The operation failed, however, and triggered widespread rioting.
In Ballymurphy a three-way gunfight erupted between local IRA men, Protestant extremists, and British soldiers. The soldiers said they were under IRA attack. Locals insisted all victims were unarmed passers-by or trying to aid the wounded.
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