THE failure to link a rifle recovered by police in 1988 to the murders of Seamus Morris and Peter Dolan in Ardoyne that same year "deprived RUC investigators of developing lines of enquiry and interviewing suspects", the Police Ombudsman has concluded.
In a report into the RUC investigation of the double murder, the Police Ombudsman, Mrs Marie Anderson, has also highlighted to the PSNI the ‘misattribution of weapons to murders as a potential systemic issue”.
Seamus Morris, who was 18, was murdered on 8 August 1988, as he walked with his brother across Etna Drive in Ardoyne. He was shot a number of times from a stolen car, which had been hijacked from a taxi driver a short time earlier in the Shankill Road area. The car then continued to nearby Brompton Park, where the gunman opened fire on a Guinness delivery lorry. Peter Dolan, aged 25, who was sitting in the front passenger seat, was shot and died from his injuries a short time later.
The Protestant Action Force (PAF), a cover name for the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), claimed responsibility for both murders. At the inquest, the RUC senior investigating officer confirmed to the Coroner that neither of the victims had any connections to any paramilitary organisation.
Central to the Police Ombudsman investigation was an examination of the origins, use, recovery, and disposal of the weapons used in the murders of Seamus Morris and Peter Dolan.
Mr Morris’ family believed Seamus’ murder was linked to the murders of five people at Sean Graham Bookmakers on the Ormeau Road in Belfast in 1992, as they had been led to believe the same VZ58 rifle had been used in both shootings. However, a previous Police Ombudsman investigation into loyalist paramilitary murders and attempted murders in the 1990s, which included the Sean Graham Bookmakers attack, established that the same VZ58 rifle had not been used.
That discovery led to a request by the Police Ombudsman to the PSNI at that time to re-examine ballistic evidence from all recovered VZ58 rifles against ballistic evidence from the RUC investigation into the murders of Seamus Morris and Peter Dolan. These checks confirmed that a different VZ58 rifle (serial number R16838), which had been recovered in North Belfast in late September 1988, was in fact the weapon used.
It had previously been linked, incorrectly, to three murders at The Avenue Bar in Belfast.
“The failure to correctly link the VZ58 rifle, at the point it was recovered by police in 1988, to the murders of Mr Morris and Mr Dolan deprived RUC investigators from developing lines of enquiry and interviewing suspects. Equally, the incorrect link made between this weapon and the murders at the Avenue Bar may also have hindered that police investigation,” said Mrs Anderson.
“This misattribution of weapons to murders, by the RUC’s Weapons and Explosives Research Centre (WERC) and/or the Northern Ireland Forensic Science Laboratory, was highlighted to PSNI as a potential systemic issue. However, it is not known the extent to which murder investigations involving the use of VZ58 assault rifles may have been misdirected in consequence of these errors.”
Relatives For Justice caseworker Paul Butler said that the findings of the Police Ombudsman investigation lists a catalogue of failures in the murder investigation, which included missed opportunities and a failure to act on intelligence that clearly emanated from sources/agents. The modus of RUC Special Branch has always been to protect their agents, including those within the UVF, he said, adding that the murders bear all the hallmarks of collusive behaviour between the RUC and UVF.
RFJ caseworker Paul Butler
Mr Butler said The RUC investigation deliberately did not exploit forensic or ballistic evidence available to them in this case, including:
* The eyewitness testimony of Seamus Morris’ brother Conor, who witnessed the murder and gave the RUC a photofit description of one of the murder gang, was not acted on. He was never asked to attend any identification parades despite the suspects being known to the RUC;
* Murder files, including journals and notebooks were destroyed/missing;
* In January 1988 one of the key suspects had been arrested when a UVF gun was found in his home, yet he was released without charge;
* numerous items discovered in the getaway car, including a discarded cigarette butt, were destroyed.
Paul Butler, continued: “The policy objective of RUC Special Branch, British army and Security Service was to rearm loyalism through the shipment of weapons from South Africa. The dissemination of intelligence to loyalist paramilitaries, the clearing of routes for loyalist murder gangs, and the deliberately flawed investigations post murders all formed part of the policy of collusion, as we believe is more than demonstrated in this devastating case.”
