BELFAST, Northern Ireland (AP) — Sinn Fein party leader
Gerry Adams was released without charge Sunday after five days of police
questioning over his alleged involvement in a decades-old IRA killing
of a Belfast mother of 10, an investigation that has driven a dangerous
wedge into Northern Ireland’s unity government.
Addressing
reporters and supporters at a Belfast hotel, Adams said he wanted his
party to provide help to the children of Jean McConville, the
37-year-old widow taken from her home by the Irish Republican Army in
1972, killed and dumped in an unmarked grave. He also rejected claims by
IRA veterans in audiotaped interviews that he had ordered the killing.
"I
am innocent of any involvement in any conspiracy to abduct, kill or
bury Mrs. McConville. I have worked hard with others to have this
injustice redressed," said Adams, 65, who has led Sinn Fein since 1983
and won credit for steering the IRA toward cease-fires and compromise
with Northern Ireland’s Protestant majority.
Yet the investigation
of Adams is not over. Police said they have sent an evidence file to
Northern Ireland prosecutors for potential charges later.
"For all
I know I can still face charges," Adams said. He said he had been
interviewed 33 times during 92 hours in custody. "One presumes they
would have made a charge against me. But they offered no evidence
against me whatsoever."
The episode has underscored the
unrelenting hostility of some Protestants to Adams and his party’s
ambitions to merge Northern Ireland into the Republic of Ireland. His
departure from the police’s main interrogation center in Antrim, west of
Belfast, was delayed two hours by a crowd of Protestants outside the
front gate. The protesters waved Union Jack flags and held placards
demanding justice for IRA victims. They roared with fury as a convoy of
police armored vehicles came into view, thinking Adams’ car was in the
middle.
Dozens of officers — many sporting full riot gear with
flame-retardant boiler suits, body armor, helmets and shields —
confronted the hardline Protestants, many of whom covered their faces,
as they tried to block Adams’ exit by sitting down in the roadway. After
a 15-minute standoff, police escorted Adams out via a rear exit that
the protesters could not see.
Adams said detectives chiefly
questioned him about audiotaped interviews that IRA veterans gave to a
Boston College oral history project. Police successfully sued in U.S.
courts last year to acquire the accounts, which had been given to
researchers on condition that they remain secret until the interviewees’
own deaths. Some accused Adams of being the Belfast IRA commander who
ordered McConville’s killing. One former Adams colleague in the Belfast
IRA, Brendan Hughes, specified that Adams gave the order that her body
should vanish to leave her fate deliberately unclear.
The IRA did
not admit responsibility for killing McConville until 1999, when the
underground organization defended its action by claiming she had been a
British Army spy. Her remains were found accidentally in 2003 near a
Republic of Ireland beach. An investigation three years later by
Northern Ireland’s police complaints watchdog found no evidence she had
been a spy.
Most of McConville’s 10 children, aged 6 to 17 at the
time of her disappearance, were placed in separate foster homes and grew
up as strangers to each other. On Sunday they expressed disappointment,
but no surprise, at Adams’ freedom.
"The McConville family is
going to stay to the bitter end of this till we get justice for our
mother," said Michael McConville, who was 11 when about a dozen IRA
members came into the family home and dragged his mother away. "We know
it is going to be a long road, but we have already been fighting for
justice for 40 years and we are not going to stop now."
McConville
said he was pleased that Adams’ arrest had achieved "a worldwide focus
on our mother’s cruel and inhuman treatment by the IRA." He said seven
other families in Northern Ireland still were waiting for the IRA to
identify the unmarked graves of their own long-lost loved ones.
Sunday’s
outcome for Adams — freedom but no official exoneration, with evidence
bound for the Public Prosecution Service — suggested police do believe
Adams was an IRA commander, but do not have strong enough evidence to
charge him with this. Police last charged Adams with IRA membership in
1978 following a firebomb attack on a hotel near Belfast that killed 12
Protestants, but those charges were dropped.
British state
prosecutors in Belfast are expected to give a second opinion. They can
tell police whether the existing evidence is sufficient to file charges,
or recommend new avenues of investigation to strengthen the chances of a
successful prosecution. Typically however, when such evidence files are
sent by police to prosecutors for complex terror-related cases, charges
do not follow.
Trying to prove membership in the IRA, a crime
punishable by five years in prison, is notoriously difficult,
particularly against commanders who did not handle weapons or take
direct part in attacks. The IRA traditionally tries to kill any
witnesses against them, a threat that Michael McConville believes
continues today. He says as a boy, he recognized some of the IRA
abductors as his 1972 neighbors, but still would never tell police for
fear of reprisals against him or his children.
While all credible
histories of the Sinn Fein-IRA movement identify Adams as an IRA member
since 1966 and a commander since the early 1970s, Adams has always
denied this. His arrest weeks ahead of elections in both parts of
Ireland infuriated his Irish nationalist party, which represents most of
the Irish Catholic minority in Northern Ireland and is a growing
left-wing opposition force in the Irish Republic.
During Adams’
detention, other Sinn Fein leaders warned they could withdraw support
for law and order in Northern Ireland if Adams was charged. The
Protestant leader of the province’s power-sharing government, First
Minister Peter Robinson, condemned that threat.
Speaking hours
before Adams’ release, Robinson accused Sinn Fein of mounting "a
despicable, thuggish attempt to blackmail" the police into dropping
charges.
"I warn Sinn Fein that they have crossed the line and
should immediately cease this destructive behavior," Robinson said,
suggesting that the future of Northern Ireland’s government was at
stake.
Robinson’s Democratic Unionist Party agreed to share power
with Sinn Fein in 2007 on condition that the IRA-linked party accepted
police authority. A former IRA commander, Martin McGuinness, serves as
the government’s deputy leader. Such cross-community cooperation
following four decades of bloodshed was the central goal of the
U.S.-brokered Good Friday peace accord of 1998.
Robinson accused
Sinn Fein of hypocrisy by demanding criminal investigations of killings
committed by Protestant militants, the police and British Army, but
rejecting any such investigations into the IRA, which killed nearly
1,800 people during a failed 1970-1997 campaign to force Northern
Ireland out of the United Kingdom.
Adams stressed at his press
conference that Sinn Fein would continue to support the police — but he
did make one formal complaint while in custody.
"The food is un-eatable," he said. "I just wasn’t able to digest it."
Copyright 2014 The Associated Press. All rights
reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or
redistributed.