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Nelson died in Wales: report

February 16, 2011

By Staff Reporter

Released in the mid-1990s from a jail sentence for conspiracy to murder and many other paramilitary offences, he lived under an assumed name a few hours away from the many people, loyalist and republican, who wanted him dead.
It had been widely assumed that Nelson was given a new life far from Northern Ireland — as far away as New Zealand — to protect him from vengeful former associates in the UDA.
According to a source in Cardiff, the Belfast Telegraph has reported, he lived there from the time of his release with apparently no greater protection than a new surname, Thompson. His apparently quiet life in Cardiff was in sharp contrast to his life in Belfast.
A UDA member, before he joined the British army he had already been jailed for torturing a blind Catholic pensioner. He was encouraged to rejoin the UDA and quickly became its intelligence officer in North Belfast.
He then left the UDA and British army and moved his family to Germany. In 1987 he was asked to return home. “I was bitten by a bug — hooked is probably a more appropriate word,” he said in his jail journal.
“Working at the level at which I did within the organization one becomes enmeshed in a web of intrigue, conspiracies, confidences, danger and power of being aware of things that others around you aren’t.”
Nelson was involved in high-level conspiracies — from the smuggling of South African arms into Northern Ireland, which were used to kill scores of innocent Catholics, to a loyalist plot to kill Belfast lawyer Pat Finucane.
When it became obvious members of the security forces were aiding loyalists in 1989, the first official police inquiry began. Nelson was caught and jailed after a plea-bargain deal that reduced the charges against him in return for his silence.
A lawyer for one of his victims has written to the British government to try to confirm the circumstances of his death. Despite evidence that Nelson died in Cardiff of natural causes, solicitor Kevin Winters said he is still seeking official confirmation.
The lawyer, who represents the widow and family of Terence McDaid, a father of two shot dead by the UDA in May 1988, said he has yet to receive any reply from since inquiring in May 2003.
Nelson’s wife’s family said he had died in Florida. His sisters said they knew nothing of his death, and only learned that he may have died through newspaper reports.
Winters said: “We are obviously aware of the latest report that Brian Nelson died in Cardiff, but we have yet to receive any substantive response from the Ministry of Defense about the true circumstances of his death, so I will be writing to them again.”
The U.S. State Department and Secretary of State Colin Powell have come under pressure to verify if Nelson was ever allowed to enter the U.S., under an assumed name, to facilitate the British government.
This was denied to Fr. Sean McManus, who led calls for a statement. Powell told him in a letter: “As a result of his felony convictions, the State Department placed Nelson on the appropriate watch list to deny him entry to the U.S. . . . He neither applied for, nor received, a waiver to enter the United States. Nelson was not legally in the United States, from the time of his release from prison, until his reported death. If he was under an assumed name, it was without the knowledge of the U.S. government.”

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