An IRA informer who spied for the British at the height of the Troubles has been found dead in his flat in England after living for 30 years under a fake identity.
Supergrass Raymond Gilmour’s badly decomposed body was found by his 18-year-old son on Friday. Police are not treating the death of the 57-year-old as suspicious.
Originally from Derry, Gilmour was recruited by the Royal Ulster Constabulary in 1976 to inform from within the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA), a republican paramilitary group. In 1980 he moved into the ranks of the IRA and started feeding information to British intelligence services. His cover was blown in 1982 when police used information he supplied to recover a machine gun.
Two years later, Gilmour became the focal point of one of the so-called “show trials” of the early 1980s in Northern Ireland. The series of high-profile, large-scale trials saw dozens of suspected terrorists charged and tried based on evidence from individual spies known as “supergrasses”.
At the time, there was widespread belief within republican communities that the trials were based on evidence from witnesses who had been offered deals and cash incentives by the British to spur them into spying.
In 1984 Gilmour was the only witness in a trial of 31 suspected republican terrorists – a trial that became notorious when the then lord chief justice dismissed the informer’s evidence as “unworthy of belief”. Once his evidence was deemed useless, Gilmour fled Northern Ireland, and was given a new life and identity in England by his handlers, MI5.
Gilmour is believed to have suffered from alcoholism and battled mental health problems in the years prior to his death.
One of his friends and a fellow spy, Martin McGartland, has slammed MI5’s handling of Gilmour. Speaking to the Belfast Telegraph, he said: “It is disgraceful that Ray died in these circumstances. He spent years begging MI5 for financial and psychological help. Instead they turned their backs on him. He was a broken man, a wreck of a human being, and they left him to die in the gutter.”
