February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
Leading anti-Agreement unionists, like Ian Paisley Jr. of the Democratic Unionist Party and the Ulster Unionist Party MP Jeffrey Donaldson, are backing Lowry and demanding a full public inquiry into his allegations.
Lowry, who is 55, told the Daily Telegraph newspaper in London on Monday that after 30 years as a police officer, he was forced to quit as head of the Special Branch in Belfast.
Lowry is taking legal action against his former employers. He was due to retire last year but was asked to stay on an extra 12 months. He told the newspaper he was forced to quit 10 weeks away from his delayed retirement. The reason, he says, was to give Sinn Fein the “scalp” of a senior Special Branch officer as part of continuing efforts to revive the political process that collapsed amid allegations of a republican “spy ring” in Stormont.
Lowry was blamed for leaking confidential information to the media (he denies this) and told disciplinary action was being taken against him. He says it was a signal that the days of the old RUC Special Branch were numbered.
The claims come in the same week that the chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, Hugh Orde, told a New York audience that some of his own officers want him to fail in revamping the force.
“There are people who want me to fail. Some of those people are within my organization,” he told the National Committee on American Foreign Policy.
Orde also said that if Sinn Fein joined the Police Board, the anticipated wave of applications from the party’s supporters would wipe out his recruitment problems overnight.
Paisley Jr., the DUP’s policing spokesman, accused Orde of “paranoia” and “unprofessionalism,” denying that there are police officers within the force working to frustrate him.
Alex Attwood, the SDLP’s justice spokesman, said, “It is refreshing that the chief constable, in a typically straightforward and direct manner, has acknowledged that which is already recognized.”
Meanwhile, detectives investigating alleged police and British military collusion in the 1989 murder of Belfast lawyer Pat Finucane have questioned the brigadier who headed the British Army’s intelligence Force Research Unit at the time of the assassination.
Brigadier John Gordon Kerr, now British military attach