Families incensed Cory reports have gone to PSNI

The families of those killed in controversial circumstances were outraged to hear on Monday that the North’s security forces were given copies of Judge Peter Cory’s report at a time when the British government is still refusing to make Cory’s findings public.
The revelation came in the Belfast High Court, where the families of murdered lawyers Pat Finucane and Rosemary Nelson and the father of LVF leader Billy Wright were attempting to force the British government to publish the murder reports. The families judicial review was due to begin on Monday morning but was put back after the British government’s defense team won a three-week adjournment.
The Finucane family has, meanwhile, launched fresh court proceedings aimed at winning a public inquiry into the lawyer’s murder.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government has refused to publish the reports that have been in its possession since last October. Cory, a retired Canadian supreme court judge, is known to have recommended full public inquiries into the killings of Finucane Nelson and Robert Hamill Of Portadown, all Catholics, and LVF leader Billy Wright.
The Irish government published in December two reports Cory had carried out regarding allegations of Garda collusion with the IRA. He recommended an inquiry into the killings of RUC officers Harry Breen and Bob Buchanan.
Blair is now under increasing pressure over the delay in publication. His government had argued that the delay was due to legal and human-rights issues. However, there is mounting concern that the reports may be shelved at the behest of the British intelligence agencies. Public inquiries into alleged collusion between the UDA, the RUC and the British army in the murders of scores of nationalists throughout the 1980s and early 1990s are likely to reveal a security policy involving systematic collaboration.
John Stevens, who is still investigating claims of collusion between loyalist paramilitaries, the British army and the RUC, reported last year that he had uncovered evidence of collaboration in the murder of Finucane by the UDA in 1989.
Finucane’s widow, Geraldine, described the revelation that the PSNI and MoD had access to the report as “outrageous.”
“I think it is an absolute disgrace that people in the MoD and PSNI have seen the report into my husband’s murder and I have not,” she said.
The father of the LVF leader Billy Wright, who was killed by the INLA in prison in 1997, said he believed the call for a three-week adjournment by the government’s defense team to be a “delaying tactic.”