IN April 1997 Eugene McKee – who died in a fire at his Twinbrook flat on Monday – spoke to the Andersonstown News about the injuries he received at the hands of prison officers after the discovery of a sophisticated escape tunnel in Long Kesh the month before.
Eugene from Bingnian Drive suffered a serious neck injury when he was forcibly removed from his cell by prisoner officers after the tunnel was accidentally discovered at the jail.
The Andersonstown News caught up with him after he had been allowed six hours special parole to attend the City Hospital because medical facilities at Long Kesh were insufficient to treat his injury. We reported that he was taking powerful doses of morphine to dull the excruciating pain caused by tearing of the ligaments in his neck.
He described to our reporter how all republican prisoners were targeted in the days after the tunnel find by prison officers out to exact revenge for the embarrassing breach of security at what at the time was described as the most secure prison in Europe.
Mr McKee said prisoners who refused to be strip-searched during a wide-spread security operation in the republican wings were stripped and handcuffed before being thrown ‘on the boards' – prison slang for the punishment block.
Eugene McKee was one of the men who refused to be strip-searched by a prison officer riot squad and he described how he received the injury that had left him in agony since he was attacked on March 23rd – three weeks earlier.
“When I refused to be strip-searched, the riot squad dived on top of me, stripped me and put on the handcuffs,” he said. “They then twisted my arms up my back and caught my head and neck in a lock. There was no call for it because I was restrained anyway, but they went ahead anyway. I told them they were going to do damage to my neck, but they kept it up.”
Mr McKee said the same treatment and worse was dished out to republican prisoners all over the jail – he was in H5, while the escape attempt had been launched from H7.
He would later receive compensation for the injuries he received.
Meanwhile, former Lagan Valley MLA Paul Butler has expressed his condolences to the family and friends of Eugene McKee.
Paul Butler, himself a former republican prisoner, said “all ex-prisoners will be saddened on hearing the news that Eugene has died in such tragic circumstances.
"Over the past number of years, we have heard of so many of our fellow ex-prisoners dying after spending many years of their lives being imprisoned as a result of the conflict in the North of Ireland.”
