Northern Ireland’s police chief constable would back moves to set up a ceasefire monitoring group to examine allegations that the IRA and other paramilitary groups are still engaged in violence.
George Hamilton told the Policing Board in Belfast, the body that includes local politicians who scrutinise the work of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, he would support a mechanism designed to report alleged ceasefire breaches.
The head of the PSNI said at the end of last month that Provisional IRA members were behind the murder of their former republican comrade Kevin McGuigan in east Belfast in August.
Hamilton stressed the PIRA leadership did not sanction the killing, but his assessment prompted the Ulster Unionist party to leave the five-party regional government in Northern Ireland, plunging its power-sharing administration into crisis.
A 46-year-old man was arrested in Belfast on Thursday in connection with the McGuigan murder. He is the 13th person arrested over the killing.
The revival of the independent monitoring commission (IMC), which had the task of examining the status of IRA and loyalist paramilitary ceasefires before devolution was restored nearly a decade ago, has been mooted as a way to rebuild the unionist community’s trust in republican goodwill and deter future ceasefire breaches.
Asked at the Policing Board meeting if he backed the restoration of the IMC, which has won broad support from the Irish government to the Democratic Unionist party, Hamilton said: “The monitoring of paramilitary groups as conducted, for example, by the independent monitoring commission until 2011, was part of a political agreement.
“The police service would be supportive of any political intervention to create some form of independent assessment process in the future.”
Unionists, including the Tory peer and Nobel peace prize winner Lord Trimble, have argued that a new IMC could act as a political deterrent, given that it would have to report via a group of international security experts on those behind violent incidents such as the McGuigan murder.
Ahead of Monday’s planned resumption of the Northern Ireland assembly, Martin McGuinness, the deputy first minister and Sinn Féin chief negotiator during the peace process, spoke directly to David Cameron on Thursday about the ongoing crisis.
McGuinness told the prime minister in a telephone call that it would be a grave mistake to side with the DUP and agree to suspend the devolved parliament even for four weeks.
The DUP leadership met Cameron in Downing Street earlier this week and asked for support for a temporary suspension of the devolved institutions. They claimed it would enable all-party talks to take place to try to rebuild faith in the process.
While he urged the prime minister not to use Westminster powers to suspend the Northern Ireland executive, McGuinness also called on all armed groups to go out of business.
“There is absolutely no case for there to be any armed group against the backdrop of peace agreements that have been made,” he said.
The Belfast Telegraph reported on Thursday that a senior Sinn Féin figure in Belfast, Sean “Spike” Murray, could face allegations in court of running a gun smuggling operation from Florida.
Murray was part of a Sinn Féin delegation that met Hamilton and other senior PSNI commanders last week and told them the PIRA had nothing to do with the McGuigan murder.
The paper said that the Florida stockbroker-turned gunrunner Mike Logan had agreed to testify against Murray and accuse him of masterminding the shipment of arms from the US to Ireland long after the IRA ceasefire.
Logan has previously spoken to the BBC’s Spotlight investigations programme and gave details of his part in the gunrunning operation. He is understood to be under witness protection pending the PSNI taking him across the Atlantic to volunteer evidence.
A spokesperson for the Public Prosecution Service, however, confirmed on Thursday that it had yet to receive any guidance from the PSNI about whether or not to proceed with the prosecution.
The Florida arms route was exposed in 1999 after Irish police officers intercepted weapons sent from the US to a post office in Galway. The arms, including Glock automatic pistols, were hidden inside boxes stuffed with toy fire engines.
Logan has been given immunity from prosecution over his confession that he was part of the plot.
