Jean McBride is appealing to supporters to raise questions after the U.S. Defense Department awarded a private security contract to former Scots Guard Tim Spicer. He had suggested, at the trial of two other soldiers, that the murdered man had been carrying a bomb.
Spicer had been the commanding officer of the two Scots Guards convicted of murdering 18-year-old Peter McBride in North Belfast.
“We are asking our supporters in the U.S. to raise this directly with John Kerry and call for a congressional hearing into Tim Spicer’s track record,” Jean McBride said last week.
Lt. Col. Tim Spicer is now involved in the private security company, Aegis Defense Services. On a number of occasions, McBride said, he has tried to justify his men’s murder of McBride by making “inaccurate and offensive claims” that have been judged incorrect by various courts.
A spokesperson for the Pat Finucane Center for Human Rights in Derry has urged all those concerned at the role of private security firms in human rights abuses in Iraq to raise concerns at this contract.
“Despite numerous court rulings that soldiers under his command murdered an unarmed boy and concocted lies to cover up their actions, Spicer has continued to claim that his soldiers should not have been prosecuted,” the spokesman said.
The spokesman added that Spicer, writing in his autobiography, had said the killers should have been sent back on patrol immediately after the murder under the “same principle as getting straight back on a horse when you have been thrown off.”
Said McBride: “His deeply offensive claims about the murder were repeated in the Daily Mail leading to calls for a boycott of the paper and a complaint to the Press Complaints Council.”
“Given the involvement of private security firms in torture and murder in Iraq I shudder to think that Spicer has been awarded a contract to create the world’s largest private army,” she said.
“As commanding officer of the Scots Guards he told a pack of lies about Peter’s murder and dragged his name through the dirt. God knows what his own private army will do in Iraq,” she added.
In one judgment made in a Belfast court, Lord Justice Kelly remarked that there was “no reasonable possibility” that either of the two Scots Guardsmen “honestly held the belief that he [McBride] was armed.”
But, in his autobiography, Spicer wrote: “Suddenly McBride stopped running and ducked down between two cars.” The court found, however, that McBride had not taken cover or ducked down between two cars.
It found he had been shot in the back and fell wounded over a car. As he slid to the ground, he was shot again.