The alleged commander of an Irish Republican Army (IRA) breakaway group responsible for Northern Ireland’s worst act of bloodshed went on trial on Wednesday in a case unprecedented, on two counts, in Ireland’s legal history.
Alleged Real IRA founder Michael McKevitt (53) could face a life sentence if convicted of ”directing terrorism,” a new charge introduced by lawmakers following the Real IRA’s 1998 car bombing of Omagh, Northern Ireland, that killed 29 people and wounded more than 300.
McKevitt also is the first senior Irish republican to face accusations from an agent of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI): border smuggler-turned-spy David Rupert. The former native of upstate New York and Indiana has been in hiding under a US witness protection program since 2001.
State prosecutor George Birmingham said he expected Rupert to begin his testimony Monday — five years after the FBI allegedly planted him in the ranks of the Real IRA posing as an Irish-American arms smuggler. It wasn’t immediately clear whether Rupert would testify in person or via a television link.
The trial at Ireland’s Special Criminal Court, which handles terrorism related cases with three judges and no jury, is scheduled to last six weeks.
McKevitt, who has been imprisoned since his March 2001 arrest, sat beside a policeman in the dock and strained to hear what was being said in the spartan 18th century courtroom with poor acoustics.
He frequently frowned in concentration, a hand over his face, a finger drumming his lip as he concentrated on his lawyers’ arguments with Justice Richard Johnson, the senior judge.
His wife, Bernadette Sands-McKevitt — a sister of Bobby Sands, the iconic IRA leader of a 1981 prison hunger strike — sat with family, friends and an observer from the New York Bar Association in the public gallery behind him.
McKevitt’s legal team, led by Hugh Hartnett, which hopes to undermine Rupert’s credibility as the star state witness, said Rupert had reached a deal with two US journalists to write what Hartnett called ”a profit-making book about his experiences”.
The defence lawyers in pretrial hearings sought to pinpoint the amount of money that Rupert had been paid by US and British intelligence agencies in exchange for his information.
The two Chicago-area journalists, who weren’t identified in court, had agreed to give Rupert 55% of the profits of the book, Hartnett said.
Hartnett said legal associates in the United States were trying to gain ”the version of events given by David Rupert to his ghostwriters,” but conceded that he was ”not certain how to deal with this novel situation”.
Birmingham confirmed that Rupert’s FBI handlers had given him permission to cooperate on a book project on condition that it didn’t appear until the end of the McKevitt trial and with the FBI’s ”prior consent”.
He said the FBI had been surprised to learn earlier this month that Rupert had begun talking to the two journalists. The FBI had opposed this move, he said, ”because it could be injurious to his security”.
McKevitt has been identified in a recently published history of the IRA as the outlawed group’s longtime ”quartermaster general,” responsible for running a network of hidden arms dumps.
According to this account, McKevitt resigned from the IRA’s ruling committee and founded a rival IRA group — soon dubbed the Real IRA by Irish media — after the IRA called a July 1997 ceasefire.
The Real IRA used car bombs to damage the centers of several Northern Ireland towns in 1998, culminating in the Omagh attack, when police responding to vague telephoned warnings unwittingly evacuated crowds toward the car bomb.
The Real IRA and a second dissident group, the Continuity IRA, have resumed such attacks but with little success. Most of their bombs since 2000 have either failed to detonate or been intercepted by police acting on intelligence tip-offs.
On Monday, police intercepted a 450kg van bomb in Northern Ireland’s second-largest city, Londonderry. – Sapa-AP