When Freddie Scappaticci’s “nutting squad” murdered suspected IRA informers the dead men’s families entered a singular hell.
To have a father, brother or son dumped by a roadside, bound and hooded, with signs of torture and shot in the head, brought shock and grief.
But the killings also brought shame and fear because the victims were deemed to be traitors, Judases within Northern Ireland’s republican community, and relatives were left to live with stigma and fear lest they too be labelled as “touts”.
It is one of the Troubles’ most macabre twists that Scappaticci was secretly working for British security services and that his handlers allowed him to act as executioner to preserve his cover.
The publication on Tuesday of the police investigation known as Operation Kenova exposed much of this secret history and offered the victims’ families an opportunity to step out of the shadows.
“Now I feel alive and I’m not going to hide again,” said Claire Dignam, whose husband, Johnny, an IRA member, was murdered by his comrades in 1992. She had been pregnant at the time and for years lived in fear, but no more, she said. “The shame, the guilt, the trying to fit in. My husband was Johnny Dignam, and I don’t care what anyone said about him in the past. My husband was innocent.”
Kevin Winters, a solicitor with KRW Law, the firm that represents victims’ families, said the exposure of Scappaticci as the agent codenamed Stakeknife, and the role played by MI5 and other state agencies, had emboldened relatives.
“For far too long they’ve been confined to the backstreets of their communities,” he told a press conference in Belfast. “The stigma of the tout or informant still runs deep in Irish history. In the aftermath of today’s report I’d like to think that suffocating stigma has subsided. Not completely but just enough to allow many families to hold their heads high knowing that the truth or a substantial part of it has emerged to help change the narrative.”
The republican community was not waving placards in solidarity with families of those killed by Scappaticci’s internal security unit but the families could look people in the eye, said Winters. “The deafening silence over their plight has been shifted.”
The families welcomed the final 160-page report, the result of nine years’ investigation by dozens of detectives and more than £40m, but it did not bring catharsis.
Some expressed frustration that Scappaticci, who died in 2023, was not named because of a government policy against naming informers. “How can you say we are getting any truth if that key detail is missing?” said Paul Wilson, whose father, Thomas Emmanuel Wilson, was killed by the IRA in 1987. “You can’t investigate the agent known as Stakeknife, spend all of that money and then not find out who he is, that seems a gaping own goal.”
Moira Todd said her family was “spat at” after her brother Eugene Simons was abducted by the IRA in 1981 on suspicion of being an informer. He was interrogated, murdered and secretly buried, leaving the family to guess at his fate until 1984 when the body was discovered near a bog in County Louth.
“They knew he was dead. They didn’t tell us. My father hunted high and low, my brother walked the streets of Dundalk, of Dublin, hoping to bump into him, and all the while, the authorities knew that he wasn’t coming back, he was gone.”
Establishing a full picture of state complicity mattered more than official confirmation of Stakeknife’s identity, said Todd. “Everyone knows who Scappaticci is. Let’s get on with finding out how he was allowed to do it.”
Jon Boutcher, the chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland and a former head of Kenova, said many families had faced years of intimidation, isolation and humiliation at the hands of those who murdered their loved ones.
“The suffering of those families has undoubtedly been amplified by the failures of the state, the failure to protect individuals, the failure to properly investigate their murders, and, latterly, the failure to provide survivors with the answers to which they are entitled.” He lauded those who attended the report’s launch: “The victims in this room represent courage, humility and dignity.”
