Peter Madden addressing the meeting Photo: Madden & Finucane

Speaking on the 26th anniversary of the killing of the Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane, his partner from the legal practice Peter Madden has renewed the call for an independent, international inquiry into the shooting. At a meeting in North Belfast he also rejected the findings of the 2012 de Silva review into the case ordered by British Prime Minister David Cameron. Mr Madden accused British QC Desmond de Silva of exonerating the secret British army unit Force Research Unit (FRU) of its role in the Finucane killing when he concluded that the unit, based in the British army’s headquarters at Thiepval Barracks, Lisburn, did not know the UDA was targeting Pat Finucane.

Mr Madden also asserted that de Silva was being “selective” in respect of the intelligence material he analysed saying “the de Silva review is one man’s analysis of a large amount of material”. Mr Finucane, who was 39, was shot dead at his home in North Belfast in front of his family by the Ulster Freedom Fighters, a cover name for the UDA, on February 12th 1989.

Also speaking at the event organised by the Finucane family and Relatives for Justice (RFJ), held in the Lansdowne Court Hotel on February 12th 2015 was the veteran BBC journalist John Ware, whose Panorama programmes revealed to a sceptical British audience the extent of collusion between the British army, RUC and loyalist paramilitaries.

Geraldine Finucane with Panorama reporter John Ware Photo: Relatives for Justice

The first to address the packed hall was Mark McGovern, who for the past number of years has been working with RFJ examining the “patterns of collusion and collusion as a policy” focusing mostly in the Mid-Ulster area. Mr McGovern also raised the need, when analysing collusion, to look at the hundreds of people killed by loyalists in the early 1990s, after the importation of arms from South Africa and the political objectives of that campaign.

Pat Finucane Anniversary Talk Photo: Madden & Finucane