Police Vigilantes Reported to Be Leaking IRA Names

In what could be the most serious development so far in the Northern Ireland security scandal, a Belfast newspaper said Monday that a previously unknown police vigilante group had given the paper secret documents identifying 233 suspected activists of the outlawed Irish Republican Army.

The leak to the newspaper, the Irish News, was the largest of a dozen such security breaches already under investigation by a special police inquiry team, which immediately sent a pair of detectives to interview the News’ deputy editor, Terry McLaughlin.

McLaughlin, whose byline was on the article in Monday’s issue of the pro-Catholic daily, is a “respected professional,” according to British colleagues familiar with his work.

A spokesman for Northern Ireland’s provincial police, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, had no comment on McLaughlin’s article, which said that an underground group was formed four years ago by active and former constabulary members.

The group calls itself the “Inner Circle” and is dedicated to the destruction of the four-year-old Anglo-Irish agreement on Northern Ireland and to the “removal of republican (Catholic) terrorists,” the article said, quoting an unidentified member of the group.

In 1986, an obscure local newspaper in Northern Ireland reported that a group of policemen had organized to oppose the Anglo-Irish agreement, but Monday’s article in the Irish News was the first to provide details. It quoted what it said was a spokesman for the group as saying it has members in Royal Ulster Constabulary headquarters and in all but one of the constabulary’s 54 divisions and subdivisions across the province.

Seamus Mallon, deputy leader of Northern Ireland’s mainly Catholic Social Democratic and Labor Party and a member of the British Parliament, said the existence of such a group would amount to “incipient mutiny” within the constabulary ranks and an “implied challenge to British government policy in relation to the Anglo-Irish agreement.”

About 90% of the constabulary’s 12,000 members are Protestants. They are responsible, along with regular and locally recruited British army units, for maintaining order in the province, which has been torn by 20 years of sectarian violence between the Protestant majority and a large Roman Catholic minority.

Militant Protestants oppose the Anglo-Irish agreement as capitulation to the Catholics and the first step toward ceding sovereignty over Northern Ireland to the independent Republic of Ireland in the south.

Evidence of Collusion Alleged

Militant Catholics, who favor the removal of British troops and unification with the south, maintain that the leaks are further evidence of collusion between the British-controlled security forces and illegal Protestant paramilitary groups.

The security leak scandal began in late-August, when one such paramilitary group, the so-called Ulster Freedom Fighters, showed a British Broadcasting Corp. reporter official documents and videotapes identifying suspected IRA members. The material was meant to support claims that a Catholic killed by a paramilitary “hit squad” a few days earlier was in fact an IRA liaison officer.