Original subtitles

The Republic of Ireland against Italy

in this group of the World Cup finals.

I'd say the biggest day

in Irish international soccer history,

the Giants Stadium is filled to capacity.

Plenty of Irish in evidence,

and obviously here to enjoy a great day out...

If you look around the Colosseum, it's full of Irish...

...we've got to take in the atmosphere.

It's Italy nil, Ireland one.

That's away to Costacurta.

Donadoni Roberto, Donadoni...

I remember being in my aunt's house.

She lived in Downpatrick, which isn't too far from here,

about eight or nine miles, on a Sunday morning.

I was upstairs in her house in bed, sleeping,

and being wakened out of my sleep

to come into the room to Tony, to my brother,

and we were told together.

I always remember my two uncles were there,

wearing a coat that a man would wear to a funeral,

big long, top heavy coat.

I remember thinking,

first of all, why are they here

and why are they wearing a big, top heavy coat?

It was June.

It was the summer, why are they wearing big coats?

And I just remember Mommy saying to us

that bad men had come into the pub

and they had... had guns

and they'd shot six people and Daddy was dead.

He had died.

Nobody that I had known had ever died before,

so I didn't really know what was happening.

We had just came home

from Spain on holiday

and my husband came down here to watch the match.

So I came down to join him about ten past 10:00.

And when I came down,

I met a local man at the door and he said,

"Don't go in there, there's been a shooting."

And for some reason I thought

there was a few boys around here

would have went out and shot rabbits or whatever

and I thought somebody's gone in there with a gun

and it went off accidentally.

And he said, "No, no, don't go in.

"It's terrible, we need a clergyman."

So I did come in.

And...

what greeted me will haunt me to the day I die.

Bodies just lying everywhere.

The smell, the smoke was lingering,

broken glass.

I couldn't see it, I couldn't. I had to walk away,

I had to run out, I couldn't.

* Good evening to you One and all

* Good luck to you I'll say

* I just came here To sing to youse

* Before I go away

Barney was a well known character,

with his pipe and his wee rosy cheeks.

He was jovial.

The night the massacre happened,

where were you, what are you doing?

Some of the things I can remember,

but a lot of it blurs.

It was such...

Oh, it was horrendous.

The parish priest arrived up,

and we knew then

that Barney...

definitely was...

was dead.

Did you see anything?

No.

And...

You know, neighbors round here had no...

no problems whatsoever.

To come to this community was unreal.

It was as simple as that.

The Troubles were something that happened in Belfast.

Yes, we were aware of them

and we were aware of all the atrocities and,

you know, people losing their lives,

but it was something that never touched us

and we never, ever for one minute thought

that we would ever have to live through that.

Brutal, inhuman, barbaric, callous slaughter,

some of the words used today to describe

last night's atrocity by Loyalist terrorists

in a pub in County Down.

O'Toole's bar lies some half a mile off the main

Belfast to Newcastle road at Loughinisland.

It's a comparatively small bar in an isolated rural area.

Slaughter in Loughinisland,

as the UVF shoot 11 people in the back

as they watch the World Cup on television.

Six men are dead.

The gunmen from the outlawed Loyalist group,

the Ulster Volunteer Force,

walked into the Heights Bar and sprayed it with gunfire

from automatic assault rifles.

The attack was over in seconds.

All six men who died were Catholics.

The eldest, Barney Green, was 87.

His nephew, Dan McCreanor, who was 59, perished with him.

The other victims were father of four, Eamon Byrne,

father of three, Malcolm Jenkinson,

father of two, Adrian Brogan,

and single man Patrick O'Hare.

Bodies were piled on top of each other.

It's just beneath contempt the people

who could carry out this type of thing.

It was just a nightmare after that. Um...

Then there was the whole process of grieving

and the funeral.

Protestants and Catholics walked together

as the hearse carrying Adrian Rogan,

the first victim to be buried,

past the Heights Pub in Loughinisland,

where the six men were murdered.

It was a very innocent way

of spending a few hours

in the company of friends,

arguing over the progress of the game,

delighted in the goal.

I remember walking behind the funeral,

and my Granny had me by the hand.

Loughinisland, it's a close knit community.

I remember being...

I suppose, when you're small, a child,

it was like thousands of people everywhere.

For those who have done this,

those who have killed these people,

my message to them is this.

I suppose some of you have families.

Let's just picture a future conversation

that you may have with your daughter,

who asks you what you did in your so-called war, Daddy.

And you will say, "I killed a man of 87."

He was sitting with his back to me.

He was watching the World Cup.

I shot him dead.

She won't think that the record of a hero, will she?

Now, I want to say this at the end,

you are going to be caught sooner or later.

The RUC never give up.

And you will be caught,

and you will spend long years in prison.

Thank you very much.

I got a letter from the Queen...

a letter from the Pope.

This made world news.

Former football great, OJ Simpson, and his lawyers,

are preparing for tomorrow's arraignment

on double murder charges.

Meanwhile, police in Northern Ireland

are hunting for two gunmen

after the worst violence there in months.

The men killed six people while they were watching

Ireland's World Cup soccer match.

I thought the police can't let this go.

I mean, the eyes of the world are on them,

they have to be seen to be doing the right thing here.

I can remember distinctly the policemen coming into the wake.

A few of them actually would have known my husband.

I'll never forget their words.

"We will leave no stone unturned

'till we get the perpetrators of this."

And those words ring in my ear to this day,

because I don't think they ever lifted a stone,

never mind turned it.

More than 20 years after the massacre,

the Heights Bar is still in business.

The bars's been rebuilt,

but Aidan O'Toole, the man shot in the kidney,

still pours Guinness for local farmers.

I first came here to do a short film

about the World Cup match,

but I was haunted by the story of the unsolved murder.

Why this pub? Why this village?

What was at the heart of the mystery

the victims' families were trying to solve?

I was moved by their search,

even as I knew they weren't alone.

For nearly 50 years,

Northern Ireland has been haunted

by what is known simply as the Troubles.

It's fair to say that the origin of the Troubles was in 1922,

the year Ireland declared its independence from Great Britain.

As part of that agreement,

Ireland was divided into two parts.

The Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland,

a province that remained a part of the United Kingdom.

By the late 1960s,

Northern Ireland was tearing apart.

An embattled Catholic minority,

victims of legal and economic discrimination,

sought civil rights and unification with the Republic of Ireland.

Against them stood the mostly Protestant majority called Loyalists,

who wanted to remain a part of the United Kingdom.

Over time, both sides descended into terrorist campaigns,

killing thousands of innocent civilians.

For Republicans, the dominant force was the IRA.

For Loyalists, there were a number of groups,

including the UVF,

which would take responsibility for Loughinisland.

The UVF, when the Troubles started in 1968,

when there was rioting and houses being burnt on the Shankill Road,

they came to the fore, as a sort of protector of the Protestants.

The heartland would have been the Shankill Road,

east Belfast, north Belfast, Portadown,

that would have been more or less the centers for the UVF.

And they got engaged in sectarian murders.

So they would have went out and killed Catholics.

The famous Shankill Butchers were UVF.

They went out and picked up innocent Catholics

walking home at night and cut their throats,

tortured them and killed them.

They talk about soldiers in the Ulster Volunteer Force.

They weren't soldiers.

They were people who went out and murdered innocent people.

You were involved in paramilitary activities

going back to the '80s and you were in prison.

What were you in prison for?

I was in prison for being a UVF activist

and being involved in murders.

I come from a neighborhood

which is known as the Shankill in Belfast.

And I suppose its historical significance,

and the best way to describe it

is that it was a pro-British community.

Quite a lot of people when I was growing up

joined the British Army and went off and fought

in conflicts all around the world.

So there were strong links with England

and with the Royal family.

The majority of them would have been Protestant,

but there were Catholics lived in my neighborhood as well.

IRA violence at the time in the Shankill where I lived.

I had watched pensioners,

I'd watched an 18-month-old baby being blown out of a pram

by an indiscriminate bomb.

People were being murdered on the street.

The IRA, at the start

they were just a bunch of killers.

Really it was a blood lust.

They generally went after soldiers and police,

but they did carry out sectarian murders as well.

Usually tit for tat.

If a Protestant was shot dead one night,

then a Catholic was shot dead the next,

and it just went back and forward and back and forward.

Sadly there was people queuing up

on both sides to join to be gunmen.

Young kids were coming along and looking at these people

walking down the street,

these big fellas who thought they were the bees' knees.

"I want to be like him."

So there was no shortage of people willing to pull a trigger.

For a while I was working in the intelligence world,

particularly in relation to Loyalist terrorism.

Earlier on I served in west Belfast,

which was probably the most dangerous place in the province.

Murders occurred every day, every other day.

I suppose it's like an adrenalin buzz.

You went out every day not knowing what was going to happen.

So, exactly why did you decide to join the police, the RUC?

Um...

I suppose it was because it was a job for life.

Wasn't there a bit of risk at that time

in terms of being in the RUC?

That's why I'm smiling.

It's a job for life if you live long enough.

There was an element of risk, yeah, there was a risk.

At that time I had a personal protection weapon.

I also had a shotgun which was kept beside the bed.

I taught my wife how to fire them both.

Gave her the strategy that the shotgun

would be shot down the stairs,

and if it came to the handgun we were in trouble.

So far as the attacks on the RUC are concerned,

the IRA seem to be justifying those in advance

by its allegation yesterday

that the police were torturing suspects.

To stop the escalating violence,

the British government deployed the Army.

The IRA viewed that as an invasion,

and the soldiers as occupying forces.

They also believed that members of the military

were collaborating with Loyalist gangs

by offering access to intelligence and weapons.

I arrived in Northern Ireland

as a young newspaper reporter in 1974.

I was based in Belfast for three years

when something like 600 people died.

In those days, the Army was in the lead role in security.

Police were in support of the Army,

not the other way round.

So it was a quintessential insurgency.

It was really a civil war. It was a civil war.

The Army are up here in the middle of Lenadoon Avenue.

- They have come...

...after earlier confrontation down at the end...

The bus station was crowded

when a bomb went off without warning.

It is a tragic, dangerous,

and absurd corner of the United Kingdom.

Violence went on throughout the late '80s

and into the early 1990s.

The IRA had developed its bomb making capabilities,

had developed its sniper attacks,

and was very much now

fighting an urban war against the British Army,

the police and the Loyalist paramilitaries.

People were just being killed by Republicans, by Loyalists.

Things were completely out of control.

The Loughinisland massacre was just something

that always stuck with me.

There have been hundreds of fatalities

and massacres on all sides,

but for some reason there were so many

unanswered questions with Loughinisland.

It just never went away.

It was always there in the back of the head.

I remember where I was on the night of the massacre.

The Republic of Ireland football team

were playing Italy in the 1994 World Cup.

I'd say the biggest day

in Irish international soccer history.

There was a reason everyone in the Heights Bar

was huddled around the TV on the night of the massacre.

There was a symbolic backdrop to the World Cup match

in Giants Stadium in New Jersey.

Ireland, for once, had a world class team

that seemed to unify the war torn Ireland.

One image I'll always remember

is going out to the Meadowlands, the day of the game,

and seeing these cars from everywhere.

Alabama, New Mexico, Minnesota, California,

all with Irish flags on them,

and realizing, you know what, guys?

This is a home game for Ireland.

When we walked into the stadium

and you walked in and looked out,

I just saw this sea of green.

You had this din, you had this Irish singing,

you had this party going on,

people dancing in the stands, you know...

It was just a huge expression of Irishness.

There was a sense of larger meaning to the game, wasn't there?

A sense that the Troubles might be ending?

Yeah. Very much so.

You were always aware of the fact that

the sporting arena was one that reflected the broader Ireland,

particularly in Northern Ireland.

The game was poised at this moment of true breakthrough

and hope for the Irish peace process.

For Irish fans, the game carried a sense of moment.

Only a few months before, Gerry Adams,

the political negotiator for the IRA,

was invited to America for unofficial peace talks

without first renouncing violence.

We put to the President that a visa for Gerry Adams

would have a dynamic effect on the Irish peace process,

and he accepted it despite the fact that everybody around him,

including the Secretary of State,

CIA, the FBI, the British government,

every one strongly opposed that Adams visa.

He granted the visa to Adams,

and that was a huge breakthrough.

I did believe that by giving Mr. Adams this visa,

this limited visa to come here,

that we might have a constructive role

in pushing the peace process.

There are a number of armed factions in my country,

the largest one is the British Army.

They are allies in the Loyalist death squads

and the Irish Republican Army.

And I want to see an end to all armed factions.

Seeing Adams treated as a statesman

was infuriating to Loyalists and the British government.

They saw Adams as a terrorist,

and the American negotiators as coddling a man

who had blood on his hands.

Was the attack on the bar that night

a way of lashing out at the peace to come?

The killers had to be thinking about the game

and the hope it offered for the people in the bar.

I remember from nowhere

this ball coming dropping into the midfield for Ray Houghton.

He sees the opportunity and he lets fly.

I was thinking, "This can't last."

But as the game went on,

the Republic grew in strength

and the Italians didn't fancy it.

History has been made at Giants stadium.

The Republic of Ireland have beaten Italy.

At the end of it, to have defeated Italy,

the place went absolutely mad.

We had gone down into the press center

and I rang the office to speak to the Deputy Editor.

And I said, "This is brilliant, Jim.

"I mean, it's got to be page 1 tomorrow."

And he said, "It won't be page 1 tomorrow."

And I said, "Why not?"

And he said, "We've had an atrocity here."

The getaway car was discovered

the morning after the attack by a local farmer

who noticed the car in his field,

seven miles from the scene of the attack.

At that time the usual practice for paramilitaries

carrying out such an attack,

they would burn the car to destroy forensic evidence.

Unusually in the Loughinisland attack,

the car was left fully intact.

I'll be honest. I thought it was fantastic.

We're going to be able to

work on something from the car.

You had hair samples, you had fingerprints,

you know, there would have been a lot of...

Even in those days there would be

a forensic gift, gold mine.

Within six weeks,

it was August 4th 1994,

the VZ58 rifle,

which had been used to kill everyone,

was found in a field

not far away from where the car was found.

Nearby a holdall was found

containing gloves, handguns, balaclavas.

There was a hair follicle found in one of the balaclavas.

So there was a wealth of forensic possibilities.

There was a series of arrests

in July and August, uh, of that year,

and there was an expectation,

certainly the families hoped,

that this was all leading to people being charged,

the people who had carried out the atrocities

being charged and being brought to justice.

Good evening. Six weeks after the IRA said

its campaign of violence was over,

Loyalist terrorists in Northern Ireland

have also declared a ceasefire.

Within six weeks of the Loughinisland massacre,

the IRA and Loyalist ceasefires were called.

So the whole world attention

was on this new future that Northern Ireland was facing.

This new sense of hope.

Like other atrocities,

Loughinisland became something that you didn't talk about,

because nobody wanted to reopen the past.

The only people who remembered Loughinisland

was the families and the loved ones.

Time went on,

and we chose to stay quiet because that was our nature.

That was the nature of this community.

Just get on with your life.

So we waited and we waited and,

you know, we were drip fed bits of information about people,

suspects having been arrested

and we kept thinking, "Right, this is it now."

And then after about, I would say, a year, two years,

it just stopped, there was no contact.

And again we chose just to stay quiet

and hope that some day

somebody would be brought to justice.

I think I, you know, deserve the truth

to know what happened.

Like, my Daddy was only 34.

That's not much older than what I am now.

Like, he was young. To me he was old,

you know, he had a mustache and he was my Daddy,

he was old, I was eight, he was, not an old man,

but he wasn't, he was 34 years of age.

If I don't stand up for him

and I don't fight my Daddy's corner,

who else is going to do it?

I want somebody to be held accountable

for what happened here.

They've probably been

the least vociferous victims of the Troubles.

Relatives of the six men murdered by the UVF

at Loughinisland 12 years ago this Sunday

have never spoken publicly about the ordeal,

their grief, or the lack of progress

in the police hunt for the killers.

But today, the families gathered in Belfast

to demand answers.

Ten years with no information,

no liaising with the families.

We were kept in the dark.

I can think of no reasonable reason

why any reasonable police officer...

From the very first consultation with the families,

there was just a sense that something wasn't right.

All they ever wanted to know was what happened.

By the end of 2005,

we had three meetings with senior police officers.

The police were saying, "We have the boiler suits,

"we have the balaclavas,

we have the weapons, we had the car."

I thought, "Had the car?

"Where is the car?"

Why not you have the car?

Where's the car?

So just where is the car?

"Oh, well, you know, the car was destroyed.

"And, uh...

"But be sure that all forensic opportunities

were realized from the car."

Hold on. You destroyed the car?

The largest physical exhibit in the case,

and you've destroyed it?

The car wasn't the only thing that disappeared.

All the transcripts of the initial interviews with suspects

were also destroyed.

More than ten years on,

even as the police kept the case open,

more and more doorways to the truth were closing.

To be honest,

we had always been suspicious.

And on reflection,

sometimes I kind of feel a bit guilty

that we didn't speak up,

because it seems now that we were almost...

That's what they wanted us to do.

They wanted us to stay quiet and this would go away.

Every question we were asked, we were told,

Oh, we can't tell you that now,

you have to put that in writing.

No, we can't tell you that, that's national security.

We were thwarted all the time.

I have no idea why the car was destroyed,

but the fact it was destroyed...

One of the things I do remember

was five o'clock in the morning after the massacre.

My husband, he went out and cut the grass.

It seems strange now, but people were coming and going and...

It was three policemen standing out

and there was a neighbor came down,

rolled down the window of the car and he says,

"You need look no further than those there."

He said that.

That was his immediate reaction.

"You need look no further than them beep there."

Somebody came in here and murdered six innocent people

that was left on the floor to die.

And it's not even that they didn't do anything about it.

Somebody somewhere helped these people cover this up,

helped them get away with it.

We want to know how high does this collusion go?

There were six innocent men.

My Daddy and I want the truth,

and I want to know why it happened,

who allowed it to happen,

and there are questions that we need answers to.

Last week, the police who've been

conducting a new investigation into Loughinisland,

arrested a man and a woman,

but they were quickly released without charge.

The Police Ombudsman's office have confirmed

that they have received a complaint

from families in Loughinisland,

and they say they're carrying out an investigation.

After the ceasefire,

Northern Ireland established

the office of the Police Ombudsman

as a way of trying to reckon with the past.

Its mission was not to solve crimes.

It was to look into police misconduct,

including collusion,

a catch-all name for corrupt relationships

between police, informants and terrorist gangs.

Collusion first emerges in the mid to late '80s,

where Republicans allege that there was collusion

between the police,

between members of the British Army

and Loyalist paramilitaries in the murder of Nationalists.

Collusion was a feature

throughout 30 years of conflict,

and the official line was that

any policeman or British soldier

that was involved with Loyalist paramilitaries

was a bad apple.

To a lot of police officers,

collusion is quite a toxic word,

because it's capable of a very broad meaning, okay.

And it doesn't easily fit into a sort of criminal code.

I mean, collusion is a sense in which

people are giving nudges and winks and nods.

There is no criminal offense of collusion.

However, if you were concerned

that the police were either involved

in killing your loved one,

or involved in colluding with those

that killed your loved one,

the Police Ombudsman's office had a responsibility

to investigate your complaint.

In 2011, the Ombudsman Al Hutchinson,

released the first report on Loughinisland.

Hutchinson's report detailed

some staggering facts about the case.

Some evidence was destroyed,

DNA links to the weapons were mishandled,

and a police informant had been involved

in the sale of the getaway car.

That was the first time that those facts

were presented in an evidence based fashion.

However, the one word that would not appear in that report

was "collusion."

Al Hutchinson performed factual gymnastics

to avoid that conclusion.

We were really, really disappointed in that.

And angry. Very, very angry.

At one stage I would have loved to have

put my two hands round his neck.

I can remember at the press conference that day

there was one guy,

he's a local fella here,

and he did say,

there are two words missing from this report,

"Special" and "Branch."

Special Branch is the intelligence unit in the police

charged with watching terrorists

and handling informants.

There were questions about what they knew

and when,

and whether they were keeping

that information to themselves,

or whether it was scrubbed from the Hutchinson report.

It almost appeared that

that report began with its conclusions

and cut the pieces of the jigsaw to make it fit.

Last year, the then Police Ombudsman, Al Hutchinson,

published a report which criticized the police inquiry,

but found insufficient evidence of collusion.

The families strongly disagreed with that conclusion

and started a lawsuit

to have the Ombudsman's findings overturned.

This morning at the High Court,

the current Ombudsman, Michael Maguire,

agreed that last year's report should be quashed.

We are delighted, we are vindicated.

Mr. Maguire can now go back and start again

and hopefully come out with a report

that gives us truth and justice.

So the way is now open

for the Police Ombudsman to start a new investigation.

It's now been more than 18 years

since the massacre at this bar.

In that time, 16 people have been arrested,

but no one's ever been charged with the murders.

The families though hope that today's development

will be a step towards finding the truth.

Chris Page, BBC Newsline, Loughinisland.

Loughinisland case was

one of the iconic cases in the history of Northern Ireland,

the history of the Troubles.

T was one of the cases that arrived on my desk

shortly after I was appointed in 2012.

What happened with the first report

was that it was very specifically focused

on the attack on the Heights Bar on the 18th of June,

so it looked at the investigative steps

that were undertaken at the time of the incident.

The crime scene management, and then subsequent steps.

There were significant areas

which had not been investigated,

and that included the incidents leading up to Loughinisland.

It was important to broaden the investigation

and effectively go back to the start.

In 2013, Michael Maguire and his team

started a new investigation into Loughinisland.

Like Hutchinson, Maguire decided not to reveal

names of sources or suspects.

Police officers were identified by numbers,

possible suspects by letters.

Unlike the first report, Maguire's investigation

looked much deeper into the case

and what led up to the killing.

The report confirmed that the UVF,

a Protestant paramilitary group,

was responsible for the Loughinisland attack.

But the investigation disproved the UVF claim

that there had been an IRA meeting in the bar.

It had been a tit for tat killing.

Three days earlier,

an IRA splinter group had shot dead three UVF leaders

standing at a bus stop on the Shankill Road in Belfast.

The UVF called for revenge,

with orders from members to kill Catholics,

any Catholics.

People knew that there would be

some kind of retaliation.

That had always happened

like this when one side attacked the other,

there would be retaliation.

The initial police response

to the attack on the night was, you know,

given the chaos and the terror

that was surrounding the aftermath of that event,

was as good as could have been expected.

They did seal off the crime scene,

they put out vehicle check points,

they put up a helicopter.

We checked the flying time for that helicopter,

and it was reasonable in terms of

the amount of time it was in the air.

So the initial response of the police to that attack

to us seemed to be not an unreasonable response.

However, there were more serious

fundamental investigative problems

which came up pretty quickly.

In Dr. Maguire's report,

Police Officer 4,

he was the senior investigating officer

on the night of Loughinisland.

He actually visited the scene of the attack.

There was a meeting that night of all the senior detectives,

but then, within 24 hours,

at most 48 hours,

he went on holidays

for I think it was a month to six weeks.

The biggest mass murder in the region...

I would have thought, you know,

that would have been one of his main priorities.

But the first thing on the agenda was his holidays.

It wasn't six people are lying dead in a bar there.

The following day,

the 19th of June 1994,

the vehicle was found abandoned in a field.

There's some mechanical issue happened with that vehicle

and it appears to have been pushed off the road,

and from there the gunmen,

and I include driver in that description,

but the gunmen, the three people,

and we have witnesses,

we see witness statements to describe three people.

So we are saying the three people,

a driver and two,

have made good their escape probably on foot.

What is utterly frustrating

is the poor investigative practice

conducted by the police.

There was no forensic examination

of the field afterwards.

And I know it sounds, sometimes it sounds as though,

what are you going to do with a field?

But actually the potential to harvest evidence from a field is very good.

You know, the relevance of things like

botany, vegetation, soil typing.

If you can take soil samples

from somebody's shoes or clothing,

what you can do is potentially connect somebody to the field.

If you can connect them to the field,

you may be able to connect them to the car.

You know, it's a rolling process.

But if you don't conduct that

and you don't gather it in the first instance,

you lose the opportunity to do that.

The car itself, it had been allegedly sold

the day before the crime by a gentleman in Belfast.

A call went out to see the last registered keeper of that vehicle,

somebody in Belfast,

and an officer was tasked to go and investigate that.

So I was briefed to go down to Belfast

and interview several people.

Most importantly, the person who sold the car

shortly before the shooting took place.

Because obviously that's going to be the link

to whoever's doing the shooting.

Now, it wasn't unusual

when you go to a different area

to go to the local police and the local links.

They'll have the local knowledge,

they'd know the personalities.

They would maybe have a relationship,

some form of working relationship

with those personalities as well.

What was unusual on this occasion is that I went down,

I was told who I could speak to,

who I couldn't speak to,

and the people that I spoke to what they would be saying.

But just as importantly, what they wouldn't be saying.

With retrospect,

do you wonder about that day

in terms of what you were being told?

Looking back, it certainly at that time,

I felt... the word I use is "orchestrated."

The interviews were orchestrated.

The statements that I would be taking was orchestrated.

The meeting was orchestrated.

I never got speaking to the man that,

as a, if I was in overall charge of the investigation,

who I would want to be speaking to.

But everybody was happy with that.

So obviously there was things going on above my head

that other people were looking after.

Later on in that day,

Special Branch officers met with

the senior investigating officer

and senior members of the investigation team,

and verbally articulated those persons

they believed would be responsible

for the Loughinisland atrocity.

We are talking about the following day.

The attack is at 10:00, for argument sake,

Ten o'clock on the 18th.

And we are talking about

during the course of the day on the 19th.

It's a matter of hours.

They looked at the intelligence they had and said,

"These are the people you really want to concentrate on.

The day after the massacre,

Special Branch suddenly revealed intelligence

about the suspects that they had been keeping to themselves.

For the past six years,

police had been aware of men from a Loyalist gang

who had been implicated

in a string of armed assaults and murders.

In 1986 in Dundrum, they had tried to kill John O'Rourke,

and were likely involved in the murder of Jack Kielty.

In November 1992,

they tried but failed to kill Peter McCarthy

at the Thierafurth Inn,

a place believed by the gang to be an IRA hang out,

eleven miles from Loughinisland.

The gang returned to the Thierafurth Inn two weeks later

and killed another man named Peter McCormick.

It was eerily like the murder at Loughinisland.

The men drove used cars from Belfast,

wore balaclavas and boilersuits,

and sprayed the bar with gunfire.

Three weeks later in Belfast, the same gang murdered Martin Lavery.

The weapon used, a nine millimeter Browning,

was later found in the duffle bag

used in the Loughinisland massacre.

None of the members of the gang were ever charged

for committing any of the murders.

Speaking to Special Branch officers,

their intelligence effort in the early '90s,

they did begin to collect intelligence

around the suspects in those murders.

The problem was that they didn't share that intelligence

with the detectives that were investigating those murders.

Slow Waltz was a policy used by Special Branch

which meant that documents would be released in slow time.

It's usually there to protect the source of that information.

So you had this situation where

investigators were dealing with

a bit of the information,

but not knowing the bigger picture.

And certainly, the bigger picture

in the context of Loughinisland,

was the sense that there was this gang in operation,

they were involved in serious criminality.

In Maguire's investigation,

the five suspects were identified only by letters.

Persons A, M, K, I and B.

The ringleader was Person A.

In 1988, Person A was a member of the British Army,

who lived a few doors down from a Loyalist club,

Clough Orange Hall,

where people investigating the Kielty murder

found a revolver, the sub-machine gun,

ammunition and an Army photo record,

a montage, with images of suspected IRA members.

One of them was targeted for killing by the gang.

Person A's fingerprints were on the montage.

He was arrested and charged, but never convicted.

When Person A was released,

the arresting officer remained concerned

about the threat posed by Person A.

That Detective was so concerned

that this individual

was a soldier by day and a terrorist by night.

That he was so concerned that he

lobbied as much as he could

for him to be thrown out of the British Army.

How exactly would you characterize Person A?

I would characterize him as I would characterize them all,

as ruthless.

Absolutely ruthless.

A serial killer?

By definition, yes.

So within 24 hours

they had the car.

Special Branch were able to come down and tell the investigators

the names of the suspects.

However, was Person A arrested that day?

Was his door kicked down his hallway?

Was he trailed into a police station

and asked to account for his movements?

Was his house searched? No.

Person A wasn't arrested in the first sweep of arrests in July 1994.

In fact, Person A wasn't even arrested

until almost two months later.

We don't know why he wasn't arrested

in July with the other individuals.

His house was searched.

Whether or not it was a case that he wasn't there

and there was work out to locate him,

I just don't know.

One of the difficulties that we found

in doing our investigation was the policy logs

that you would have expected

with the senior investigating officer,

that would write down,

"I have decided not to arrest this person because...

"I want to get further information,

or because I want to do, you know, something else."

All of that documentation wasn't available to us.

It no longer exists,

because of an asbestos problem with a police station.

They destroyed a lot of documentation,

including interview notes of potential suspects.

I've got a vehicle recovered,

I've got the potential of forensic harvesting.

You know, if I can hit somebody early enough

and there's a weak one amongst this team,

they might start tumbling.

How come they didn't do it?

Good question.

I don't know.

And I don't know because a senior investigating officer

has not spoken to me.

One key policeman in charge of the investigation

of Loughinisland had retired,

which meant he could refuse to cooperate with Maguire.

That left a fog of mystery

over why police allowed prime suspects

time to cover their tracks.

It's rotten to the core.

The very fact that the SIO in the Loughinisland case

has steadfastly refused to cooperate.

What does that tell you?

Something not right here.

You know, it's one thing when people lose their lives.

It's one thing when there's a major atrocity

and nobody's brought to book.

But it becomes a completely different thing

when nobody's brought to book

because somebody else didn't do their job properly,

or somebody else covered it up.

The families suspected

that the investigation might have been mismanaged on purpose,

possibly to protect an informant.

Throughout the Troubles,

the British government used informants, called touts,

to infiltrate terrorist groups and provide intelligence.

Let's talk about the British government's handling of informants.

Yeah.

Were there problems balancing the benefits of information gained

with the cost of protecting dangerous sources?

Well that's always a difficult issue,

because right through the period of the Troubles,

some people very bravely stood up and said,

"This is destroying our country, destroying the province.

A lot of people's lives are at risk."

And a lot of people very bravely provided intelligence

which prevented serious outrages taking place.

Now, the question then was

whether they were being properly handled,

whether it was accurate information,

and whether they were people

who could be fully trusted

and were working at all times within the law.

So you have an informant

who's working in an organized crime gang.

At what level is that individual allowed to work at?

Is he allowed to lead that organization?

Does he go to the very top of that organization?

And what dangers is that?

Is he then part of planning the operations?

And of course, if you don't authorize them to do it,

their fellow comrades and gang members

will want to know why is this person,

why are they not taking part in this.

This issue was kicked around officials year after year.

Everybody wrestled with

how do you make something that's

manifestly criminal not criminal?

And no one could do it.

However much they tried, no one could fix it.

People made decisions at high levels

to continue running sources who weren't nice people,

these people, you wouldn't want to walk through your door.

You didn't like dealing with them,

but unfortunately they still saved lives.

It was a fairly shady world,

but it was one that you had to accept.

Very frustrating.

And...

Informants are horrible to work with.

I mean, part of my job as a Detective interviewing terrorists,

even interviewing ordinary criminals,

was to recruit them,

and on some level, certainly on the criminal level,

you'd run, operate informants as any Detective would.

They were essential.

But what's emerging

was there was maybe more of it allowed to go on

than should have done.

And just who was running them is a different question.

You had the police who would be running informants,

but you also had the military

who would be running informants.

The organization that I went to prison for,

the Ulster Volunteer Force,

the likes of the police and other people

have infiltrated them.

People in British security services definitely,

you know, were recruiting people

and putting them into organizations.

And on some occasions when the police are doing this,

they're just looking for people to give them information,

not big bits of information,

but then if they grow the person big enough in that organization

then, you know, it's more than information.

It's about how do they destroy the organizations?

And they do it from within.

They create confusion.

They give misinformation. People start to get killed.

The danger of running highly placed informants came

when those agents, under the protection of the state,

started killing people.

One of the most famous examples

was not from the UVF,

but from the IRA.

He was a highly placed tout,

responsible for the torture and murder of other touts.

His name was Freddy Scappaticci,

code name Stakeknife.

Scappaticci was in prison,

an internee in the 1970s.

Later on he became a member of the IRA.

I knew him, not greatly, but I knew him.

He was an acquaintance of mine.

I had seen him at Republican events, at funerals, etc.

He was in charge of security.

Part of his role was interrogating suspected IRA informers and agents.

He was breaking people,

getting them to admit that they were informers,

and then handing them over to the IRA who killed them.

And the people who were running these agents

knew that another agent was involved

in the assassination of agents

who were actually working for the state,

and should have been protected by the state

from that point of view.

How is it advantageous to the state

to have this guy killing all these people

who were informers in the IRA?

Because my understanding is that

the people who Scappaticci was interrogating,

were people who the IRA at a lower level

suspected of being informers.

So their value to the Special Branch,

or to British Intelligence had run its course.

And so they saw a further advantage

in having their man, Stakeknife,

be the person who says,

"That person's guilty. I have broken him under interrogation.

He should be executed."

To be clear,

it was the IRA that was doing the executing.

But since British agents were running the system of touts,

the state's moral standing could be compromised

by the knowledge of crimes committed.

That gave informants power over their handlers.

Freddy Scappaticci was charged.

Freddy Scappaticci would say to his handler,

"If I'm going down, you're going down."

And the handler would turn round and say

to the British government,

"If I'm going down,

"Number 10 Downing Street is going down as well,

"because you knew all along about the dirty war,

about what we were asked to do and what we were doing."

The paper trail will lead to 10 Downing Street,

and they cannot allow that to happen.

There is a picture of Scappaticci

which sort of captures just how surreal

the secret world of agents had become.

He's walking behind a man

who was a former senior member of the IRA,

next to the coffin of his brother, Ruby Davison,

who was in fact an informer.

So we have Gerry Adams carrying the coffin of an informer,

Scappaticci who was an informer,

and there's another informer beyond the picture

who was responsible for this murder in the first place.

It's sort of madness.

This is the British government

involved in assassinating people.

It was as if they were sitting in their parlors in Surrey, or in Kent,

playing war games with our lives here.

Did the running and protection of so many informants,

all with hidden motives, spin out of control?

It was a question that haunted the Loughinisland case,

and the way the murder weapon made its way into the hands of the killers.

The weapon that was used in Loughinisland was a VZ58.

It's a Czec made assault rifle.

It looks like an AK47 people recognize,

and it's often called an AK47.

If that weapon was used in Loughinisland,

how did it come into the province?

To trace how the weapon

got into the hands of the UVF gunmen,

you have to understand the story of the arms race

between the Loyalist paramilitaries and the IRA.

The IRA was the first to smuggle in

powerful weapons from overseas.

They made a deal with Gadaffi's Libya

to provide them enough military ordnance

for two Infantry battalions,

including machine guns,

surface to air missiles and Semtex explosives.

The IRA brought the campaign to the British capital, London.

For a number of years the IRA exploded bombs in the city

and all over England.

From subway stations to financial markets.

One mortar attack nearly killed the Prime Minister John Major.

The audacity of the attack has shocked Londoners.

The van evidently stopped for several minutes

just outside the Ministry of Defence on Whitehall.

The British Parliament is only a few hundred yards away.

The IRA had certainly come to the conclusion

that a bomb in London was worth ten bombs in Northern Ireland.

It was one of the best strategies the IRA ever had,

because our opinion in Northern Ireland

was the British government believed

there was an acceptable level of violence.

A policeman getting killed in Northern Ireland,

a young Catholic getting murdered,

a Protestant getting murdered,

a soldier getting murdered

didn't mean much to English people.

They really didn't care, to be honest.

You take the war to England

and you put them under pressure,

and that's what they did with the London bombings.

A few of those, and other bombings later on.

The English campaign by the IRA

led to threats of escalation by the Loyalists.

That raised questions about whether the British government

tried hard enough to stop the Loyalists

from getting bigger and better weapons.

For Loyalist paramilitaries,

there was a strategic decision

to do what they call return to serve.

So by attacking the Catholic community

and by terrorizing the Catholic community,

this was a way of bringing the game,

as they saw it, to the IRA.

Thereby in their view,

putting pressure on the IRA to stop their campaign.

And they needed weapons to be able to do that.

As part of our investigation,

we found a document which talked about an informant

who was reported to Special Branch in the late 1980s.

He said that Loyalist paramilitaries

were preparing to buy a shipment of arms from overseas.

Did the British state

bring those weapons into Northern Ireland?

Is that what you discovered?

No, I wouldn't go as far as to say that.

Did the state know that weapons for Loyalists were coming?

Did the state know?

The state, clearly from what we've seen,

the state knew that there were plans afoot

to bring weapons in.

By late 1987,

the British government was watching the coastal waters.

Police knew that Loyalist gangs

had robbed a bank to buy a cache of guns from South Africa.

In late December, informants told

the military, and the police,

that the weapons were nearing Northern Ireland,

hidden under floor tiles in a container ship.

Then mysteriously, the government lost track of the vessel

and the guns landed somewhere near Belfast.

It was a shipment that was large enough

to equip a small Army.

I mean, we are talking about hundreds

of automatic weapons,

fragmentation grenades,

rocket launchers, handguns.

Tens of thousands of ammunition.

We know from the Ombudsman's report

that after the shipment of weapons came in,

they were held at the farmhouse of one James Mitchell.

Mitchell's farmhouse was at the heart of

what became known as the Glennane gang.

This Glennane gang was comprised

of members of the UVF,

serving soldiers, serving police officers.

From James Mitchell's farmhouse,

the most appalling acts of terrorism had been plotted,

going back at least to 1974.

Dublin Monaghan bombs, some 30, 33 people were killed.

They were turning up,

machine gunning people going into bars,

posing as soldiers with their uniforms at night

at check points and gunning people down.

They were fearsome, fearsome.

And they were members of the Security Forces.

At the farm,

the weapons were waiting to be split three ways

between three Loyalist gangs,

one of which was the UVF.

On January 8th 1988,

three cars set out from Belfast to pick up their shares.

One of the cars was followed by police,

who had been tipped off by a Loyalist informant.

The surveillance operation lost sight of these men,

and, therefore, were not able to

track them to the location where

the entirety of the arms dump was being stored.

But after they left that farm,

they were picked up, two Ford Granadas,

which were laden down with dozens of VZ58 rifles.

The suspects found driving these two Ford Granadas,

had straw and muck and manure on their boots,

so they knew that they had been to a farm type area.

And the police intelligence knew all about James Mitchell's farm,

but they don't go there.

I just wonder, "Hmm. A farmhouse near here.

Now, I wonder, could that be James Mitchell's farmhouse?"

The notion that that didn't even occur to them

is beyond belief.

Especially because very shortly after the arrest

of those Loyalists whose cars were full of guns,

someone tipped off James Mitchell

that the security forces might soon be coming

to look at his farm.

And the rest of the guns were moved very swiftly.

So you've got one half of the state

trying to interdict this stuff,

and you've got another section

within the intelligence gathering community

determined to undermine that effort,

and they succeed in doing so.

It's an appalling story.

Really appalling story.

The UVF, they ended up with

the capability they didn't have before.

The paintings appeared on walls

of the guys standing with the VZ58s.

Guns got away,

and they were used in murders, over 70 murders.

At least 70, seven zero people

were killed by the rifles alone.

How many people were killed by the bullets

and the fragmentation grenades,

and the rest of it... we don't know.

An awful lot of people died as a result

of those guns coming into Northern Ireland.

One of those weapons left the farm in Glennane

and would reach its murderous conclusion

on the 18th of June, 1994, in Loughinisland.

There is a ballistic specific trail.

The serial number of the weapon that was used in Loughinisland

falls specifically in between two weapons

that were recovered after the arms importation in January 1988.

Well, that's a great encouraging start,

and certainly the team playing

as if they were among the elite, and deservedly so.

- And camera maker.

So, about six months after the massacre,

police had a significant breakthrough

when they received an anonymous call?

From what I understand,

the call was made to a confidential reporting line

maintained by the RUC,

and basically, basically wanted to pass information

as to the potential identities

of people involved in the in shooting,

in the shooting at Loughinisland,

and gave names in relation to that.

And were those names the same names of the suspects?

They're all relevant names, yes. Oh, yeah.

And it wasn't too far later

when it was followed up by a written anonymous letter

delivered to a local councilor,

that again articulated the same information

and naming the same people as being involved.

But you weren't able to ascertain

whether the police knew who this anonymous source was?

Yes, the police knew who the source was, yeah.

And do you know how they knew?

Alex, you're taking me into an area

I don't really want to go to,

because of the constraints from which I operate under.

I mean, the police had information

which they could have exploited

and in my view they didn't do it particularly well.

I think that's all I'm prepared to say at this stage.

How exactly were the police

able to identify this anonymous caller,

given that it was anonymous?

I'm only, I'm only taking a moment to think

about some of the potential dangers in this line.

And I appreciate fully where you want to go with this,

what you want to glean off it,

but I also am really, really conscious of the potentials,

potential dangers behind it.

Because I can answer that,

but I know what your next question's going to be,

and I'm going, at that point I would shut you down completely,

because it's...

because I'd be asking the same question being in your shoes.

Was there any other evidence,

or any other information that came...

Of course, I wanted to know the name of the anonymous caller,

and whether it was the same person who'd written the letter.

But the investigators weren't talking.

To protect witnesses, they were willing to tell us the plot of the story,

but not the names of the characters.

So the Ombudsman's investigation

was a bewildering thicket of letters and numbers

"Person A, Person M, Police Officer 12."

Who were these people?

The answer came in the form of another anonymous tip.

In 2011, someone upset by the Loughinisland cover up,

leaked a document to journalist Barry McCaffrey.

The leaked document came through the post.

I still don't know to this day

what pricked somebody's conscience to send it.

Maybe it was the fact that...

they knew we were working on this story

and that the families weren't getting the answers,

or hadn't been given the answers.

The document was an unpublished report

carried out by the previous Ombudsman

into the Loughinisland atrocity.

This report had preceded Al Hutchinson's report.

It had been dated 2008.

The leaked report was a draft,

so it was unredacted.

It contained real names and critical details

about the case that had never been disclosed.

The text of the anonymous letter was missing,

but the report revealed the name of the man

to whom the letter was sent.

Patsy Toman, a local politician

who arrived at the Heights Bar just after the shooting.

I got this letter on Valentine's Day,

and I says maybe somebody's sending me a Valentine card.

But as I read down it, I found out that it was serious,

and very serious.

And it seemed to be...

I thought it was a lady's writing,

the sort of writing.

"Dear Mr. Toman, I am writing to advise you of certain facts

"that I think would be of interest to you

"in your quest to cage the Loughinisland murders.

"When I saw you on TV after the inquest,

"I felt that I had to let someone know what I was privy to.

"The men arrested after the murder

"were indeed close to the culprits.

The commander of the operation..."

No, I'm sorry, I'm not going to read it.

No, thanks.

Patsy had reason to be afraid.

Before the Loughinisland massacre,

his house had been bombed by Loyalist terrorists.

More than 20 years later,

he was still afraid to read the section of the letter

that named the alleged killers.

All right?

Patsy had given the original letter to the police,

who then lost it.

But Patsy kept a copy

and was willing to share it years later with Barry McCaffrey.

"The gunman was one Ronnie Hawthorn,

"a married man from Clough.

"Gunman two was Alan Taylor, single from Dundrum.

"The driver of the getaway car was Gorman McMullan,

"a convicted terrorist from Belfast

"and a leading light in the Belfast UVF.

"I was privy to this info, because I was

"in the original planning of the murders.

"I pulled out of the attack due to a prior engagement

"that I couldn't cover up.

"The police indeed had the boys in for questioning,

"but as a policeman told me,

'"We know who done it, but we can't prove it.

"And without proof or statements they'll go free.'

"Hawthorn and Taylor, they took part in the attack

"on the Thierafurth pub in Kilcoo a few years ago,

"and various other incidents in the area.

"This information will somehow ease my conscience,

"but will never fully clear my name.

"But I do this for the family and children

"of the men who were slaughtered in Loughinisland.

Contributed, may we all live in peace."

It turned out that the people named as the killers

in the anonymous letter were also key suspects

named in the leaked report.

Were these the same people that Maguire had focused on

in his investigation?

We looked at both documents,

and by cross referencing arrest dates,

were able to break the code and put names to all the cyphers.

Person I was Gorman McMullan,

named by the letter as the driver.

Person M was Alan Taylor,

named as the man who held the door.

Person A, accused of being the ringleader of the gang and the gunman,

was Ronald Hawthorn.

The leaked document revealed something else.

The author of the anonymous letter

and the person who made the anonymous phone call

were one and the same.

Hillary Hawthorn, the wife of Ronnie Hawthorn.

We don't know what Hillary Hawthorn looks like.

There are no images of her or Ronnie Hawthorn online.

We found an article about Ronnie's arrest for the photo montage.

We found Ronnie and Hillary's marriage certificate.

They were married in a Presbyterian church in Clough,

a few miles from Loughinisland,

ten years before the killing.

He was 24, she was 18.

Did she know then what kind of man she was marrying?

We also know that Hillary was close to local police.

A Detective told me she had actually worked

in the canteen of the Newcastle Police Station.

That's how they recognized her voice

when she made the anonymous call.

Brought in for questioning,

Hillary Hawthorn admitted writing the letter.

Area police said she did it to punish her husband for cheating on her.

What's hard to understand

is why she was never charged with a crime.

She was indeed arrested,

but we don't know what she said in the interviews,

because police fortuitously destroyed those notes

and we don't know why she wasn't charged.

But the line in this letter that states,

"I was privy to this information,

because I was in the original planning of the murders."

How this one person was not charged

before the court with conspiracy to murder,

and who knows what the author of this letter

would have wanted to do

in terms of perhaps even turning states evidence.

We don't know, because she wasn't charged.

The question of why

leads to the man who interrogated Hillary Hawthorn,

Police Officer 4, Detective Inspector Albert Carroll.

It turns out he was the Deputy SIO in charge of Loughinisland,

but left on vacation the day after the killing.

He had also been involved in three other murder investigations

regarding the Hawthorne gang.

He retired in 2011.

Barry McCaffrey went looking for him.

Where did you find Albert Carroll?

In a small village in France.

It took a long time to convince him to even meet us.

We had met him in a little hotel.

Mr. Carroll, he couldn't explain to us

why he hadn't charged Hillary with conspiracy.

I got the distinct impression that

Mr. Carroll wanted to know more what we knew about him

than what he was going to tell us about Loughinisland.

Did you show Albert Carroll

the leaked report in which he was named?

Yes.

What was his reaction

when he saw how much you knew about his role?

He shit himself.

Yes.

He was very defensive...

Yes, yeah.

Yeah, he was very defensive and edgy.

Carroll was keeping secrets,

but he did reveal a new detail.

When Hillary was arrested, Ronnie was there.

Ronnie knew about the letter and why it was written.

But instead of charging Hillary,

or using her to get to Ronnie,

Carroll let her go with a vague promise

that she would help make sure

that her husband wouldn't kill in the future.

What do you suspect is the reason

Hillary was never charged?

I suspect

that the author of this letter

wasn't charged to ensure

that the police's wider

intelligence agenda was not disrupted.

There was a kind of culture

of picture building.

The requirement for intelligence gathering was

more strategic than it was

to serve the criminal justice system.

And the intelligence tail began to wag the dog.

That issue hung over the case.

Was intelligence and protecting informants

more important than solving the crime?

And just before the killing,

what did the police know and when did they know it?

So two, maybe three months after the murders,

on one particular night, late into the night,

half past 10:00, 11 o'clock,

I was at a country bar, which would have been

about ten or 15 miles away from Loughinisland.

And two detectives came in, my colleagues.

They had just been to a meeting in Armagh,

which is where senior Detective Chief Superintendent would have been.

And in the conversation with one of them,

out of ear shot of everybody else,

what was told to me is that there was a phone call

made at half past 6:00 on the evening of the shooting,

and that the shooting had been called off.

A phone call had been made by an informant

at half past 6:00

saying the shooting had been called off,

because the car was unreliable.

We know that the killing wasn't called off,

but did Special Branch know before the murder

that there was a plan,

and that the killers were having problems with their car?

According to the letter,

Person A was Ronnie Hawthorn, the gunman.

Person I was McMullan, the driver.

Person M was Alan Taylor, the man who held the door.

An informer told police

that the three of them were on Main Street in Newcastle?

Yeah.

"At tea-time on the 18th of June 1994,

"a phone call was made to Frenchie's Bar,

"either by Person A or Person M,

asking to speak to Person B urgently."

How did Special Branch know that?

I can't tell you that.

I know how they get to know that,

but I can't tell you that, I'm sorry.

It's perfectly legitimate how they know that.

Was there a bug on the phone?

It's not.

Well, was one of the people involved an informer?

All I will tell you is that

we have seen intelligence that says

one of the legitimate suspects in the investigation

was a police informer

and continued to be for some time afterwards.

And it could be more than one,

or at least one?

At least one.

I mean, we have specifically identified one

uh, within the suspect group that

for our investigation purposes was relevant.

But there certainly could be more than one within that,

but we are only concerned with one.

By and large on the ground,

people wanted to solve crime and catch criminals.

But in Loughinisland, informants were involved,

and that's where the lines become blurry.

Had the event ran its course without any informant,

it was just a straightforward murder

that nothing could be done about, nobody knew about it.

But then when something could have intervened and it doesn't,

that raises a lot of questions.

Special Branch had intelligence

on these individuals prior to the attack

and then the getaway car was found

a short distance from the family home

of Man A, Ronnie Hawthorn.

But police never searched the Hawthorns' family home.

It has never been searched.

Another critical piece of information

we found disturbing was that

individuals who were arrested in August,

at the back end of August,

were warned the night before

that they were going to be arrested.

And subsequently to that,

we learned that the police then had further information

that the individual who warned them

had been a police officer,

and that was hugely concerning.

Of the four suspects warned,

the most significant was Person A, Ronnie Hawthorn.

Prior to Loughinisland,

he had been charged in connection with one murder

and implicated in a string of others.

In the case of the massacre,

he was named the day after as a likely suspect,

and the getaway car was found within walking distance

from his family home.

Yet the police waited two months

before Hawthorn was finally brought in for questioning.

We interviewed Hawthorn, yeah.

He'd been arrested early hours,

probably five, six o'clock in the morning.

Did Hawthorn himself seem to be smug in the interview?

I mean, was he, you know, pretty relaxed?

He wasn't stressed, that's for sure.

In my mind he was just a terrorist.

Just a hateful... a hating...

uh, bigot you know,

Killing a Catholic to him was like wiping his shoe,

a fly off his shoe.

That's what he was to me.

And if I'd have got in his way,

I've no doubt he'd have shot me, too.

Inside the police station,

the interrogation was more than a little strange.

The actual questioning about Loughinisland

only lasted for about ten minutes.

This was a kind of a charade,

it was like I have to talk to you about something,

but we're just pretending here?

"We have to be here for two hours, let's have a chat.

"Okay? We have to be here for two hours.

You killed these people, you were the gunman."

"No, I wasn't."

"All right.

"You know, we're not going to get anywhere here.

"You're not going to admit it.

That's fine, let's have a chat."

Then the conversation

turned away from interrogating Hawthorn,

to encouraging him to commit a murder.

To kill an IRA gunman who posed a threat to the Detective.

So this Detective spent most of the time

telling Hawthorn that if he doesn't kill this Catholic gunman soon,

this Catholic gunman is going to get him.

So you're telling the cat kill the mouse

before the mouse gets you,

because I'm shit scared of the mouse killing me.

If that makes sense.

So he was telling Hawthorn,

"You better get this Catholic gunman."

"Because he's going to get you."

But why is he doing that?

Because I'm petrified that guy's coming for me.

And then Hawthorn was released from Armagh, Gough Barracks,

probably about six o'clock the next night.

It was just disgusting, it was.

Five years later, Hawthorn was arrested again.

DNA testing on the hair found in the duffle bag

revealed a match to Hawthorn's family.

But within a day he was released

due to insufficient evidence.

I never wanted to believe there was collusion

in any of the murders I was at.

But Loughinisland, you'd have to say someone was being protected.

And the truth is being withheld from the families.

There was no drive at all to solve a murder.

Hope for the families arrived

with a notice that the Ombudsman was nearing

the end of his investigation.

In the spring of 2016,

I traveled back to Loughinisland for the moment

in a private meeting with the victims' families

when Maguire would reveal what he had discovered.

What do you think the outcome of this will be?

I don't know, I'm nearly afraid to think about it.

I don't want to think about it either.

It couldn't be any worse than the last one,

but you can't hold out much hope.

No.

We have been let down so many times,

we don't want to be getting our hopes up again.

No, but...

It's hard to believe that after all this time

they might eventually admit the truth.

Hopefully.

My grandchildren are now starting to ask,

"What happened to Grandad?

Did anybody go to jail? Was anybody punished?"

Because children are taught from no height

if you do wrong you'll be punished.

Should you be sent to your room or, you know,

you won't get any sweets or whatever.

You must learn to...

Get your Play Station taken off you.

Your Play Station, whatever. So...

So, I need answers for him.

Okay, ready to go?

Well, good afternoon.

Good afternoon.

Um...

Today has been the day

that we have been waiting for.

It's been a long journey,

longer than it should have been, I think,

and I'm certainly aware of people

that would like to have been here,

but can't through the passage of time,

and my sympathies to those families.

Thank you for sticking with me as we inch closer

to the publication of this report.

I appreciate your patience,

even though I recognize that at times

we didn't deserve it.

But I am grateful for the fact that you've worked with me

while we have inched towards the publication of this document.

I'm going to tell you my conclusion,

and then I'm going to tell you

how I arrived at that conclusion

based on the information that we have received.

When I looked at all the information,

which I will spell out this afternoon,

I have no hesitation in saying that collusion

was a significant element

in relation to the killings in Loughinisland.

The report is divided into three areas.

The arms importation in 1987,

the events prior to the attack on Loughinisland,

the investigation into the...

This is 22 years that these families

have waited patiently,

with dignity, they have campaigned ferociously.

Everybody knows the pain and trauma

that you have gone through.

And I think that the memory of your loved ones

has had dignity restored to them.

That's all we ever wanted was somebody to tell us the truth.

Every single person in this room,

all we wanted was the truth of what happened.

It's just hard to take in.

There's parts of it that you have to kind of park up,

because I couldn't take it all in.

Sorry.

This report is one of the most damning expositions

of state collusion in mass murder

that has ever been published.

We had the truth today, 22 years on.

Now it's time for justice and accountability.

We all deserve and demand justice

from the British government who are ultimately responsible.

This was the tip of the iceberg,

but there's still two thirds of it buried below.

The publication of the report,

it caused ripples,

that it has impinged on a lot of other cases

and a lot of people hopefully

will have gained a wee bit of hope

that they may get answers somewhere along the line,

and just keep hammering away at it.

It's 160 pages.

If you remember the last report in 2011 was 63 pages,

and of substance was probably about 55.

So there is an immense amount of detail in this that.

The finding of collusion was a victory for the families.

But there were many details that were not revealed to them.

Details that I had uncovered.

The names of the alleged killers,

the contents of the letter,

the strange role played by the suspected gunman's wife.

Then there was the question of why the police

still refused to charge anyone.

That was linked to the mystery that still haunted the case.

Who was the informant?

There needs to be accountability.

Dr. Maguire has more information to brief us with,

so what he has told us already are the headlines and they are...

There are other incidents and murders

that are referred to in the report,

and I have been approached by some of those families,

one of whom were the family of Martin Lavery,

who was murdered on the 20th of December, 1992.

We know from the report

that four people were responsible for his murder.

Persons A, M, K and person I.

The Lavery family, quite correctly,

felt that there were questions

that they had that they deserved answers to.

Through a process of legal disclosure

at a meeting with people in a position to know,

Mr. Lavery's family asked quite pointedly

were any of the people involved

in the murder of Martin an informant?

We were told that at the time of Martin's murder,

none of them were informants.

However, one of those individuals was an informer

at the time of the Loughinisland atrocity.

Knowing that it was one of four people,

I approached the source with access to the Special Branch files.

Nervous, he wouldn't say a name,

but he confirmed that one of the gang that night

was working for the British state as an informant

when Person A, Ronnie Hawthorne,

reportedly emptied his weapon into a bar full of people

watching the World Cup.

One of the things we learned,

it's not in the Maguire report,

is that among the gang that killed your husband,

there was at least one informant.

Had you heard that?

No.

Does that surprise you?

Not really.

Nothing surprises me anymore.

Um...

I suppose it's news to me,

but it doesn't. No, nothing surprises me.

I just have no idea

just how absolutely rotten this whole system was.

There's a shot and it's a goal for Ireland.

I told the families what I had learned

about the massacre

that went beyond the Maguire report.

The names of the suspects,

and my suspicions that they were still being protected

by some part of the British government.

The person named as the second gunman, Alan Taylor,

left Northern Ireland in the late '90s,

and was last seen in England.

Gorman McMullan, the man named as the driver of the car,

lives in Belfast.

A member of H and W Welders Club,

he regularly turns out for parades

celebrating the UVF,

and pops up on social media in sex club websites.

If you drive four miles from Loughinisland,

you can find a country road

scattered with lovely houses,

where Person A, Ronnie Hawthorn, lives.

He is still together with his wife Hillary,

who named him as the gunman.

When calls and letters failed to get a response,

we hired a private eye

to see if we could find out what they looked like.

This photo is the two of them at work.

They own a small company that cleans offices,

and for firms overrun by pests,

offers extermination services.

Then...

It kind of makes me look over my shoulder

that I could be meeting these people in the course of my work,

or going to the shop.

I may not know what they look like,

but they'll know me.

And that makes me a little,

if not a lot...

more anxious than I'd ever been.

It's hard to understand why,

more than 20 years after the crime,

when so much is known about the suspects,

that they can't be prosecuted.

Of course, even if convicted,

they would only serve two years.

In order to bring peace to Northern Ireland,

that was the deal made under the Good Friday Agreement,

for every murder involved with the Troubles.

For those who have killed these people,

you are going to be caught sooner or later.

The RUC never give up.

And you will be caught and you will spend long years in prison.

Thank you very much.

The government were trying to use us as pawns

to try and bring peace to Northern Ireland.

Protecting informers was much more important

than bringing the people to justice

who carried out this atrocity.

It seems as if hands are tied.

That...

What do you mean?

I think it goes higher up.

I really do believe that.

We believe that

it goes as far up, right to the top.

What has the state got out of

turning a blind eye to this murderous activity?

It's very hard to come up with an answer.

It would have to be pretty damn good.

I can't imagine what it might be.

In fact, I'd go so far as to say

the reward couldn't possibly ever

match the consequence of those deaths.

The reason Loughinisland is important,

is because it's another insight

into the kind of compromises

that we as a state made on moral and legal standards.

Every democracy has to make those compromises.

We, I think, made, uh...

more compromises

than a lot of us have been aware of,

as more of the picture of the hidden past is revealed.

Year after year,

the past is set aside to make room for the future.

But for families of victims, that's hard to accept.

They need to dig back

and reckon with what happened and why.

Surrounded by mountains of records

with many of the answers,

government officials decide each day

what they think is good to remember,

and what is better to forget.