Picked out by Ulster Unionist MP to Margaret Thatcher – shot dead by SAS soon after

» Peadar Whelan

'This admission, straight from the horse’s mouth, clearly shows that the British Government, with the collaboration of the Ulster Unionist Party, were responsible for targeting and executing people'

THE shock TV admission by former Ulster Unionist MP and Ulster Defence Regiment major Ken Maginnis that he identified three IRA Volunteers in 1988 to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher who were soon afterwards shot dead by the SAS raises the question of how many more 'suspects' were killed by the British state this way.

Maginnis was the Ulster Unionist Party Security spokesperson at the time. He is now a member of the British House of Lords.

Speaking on the RTÉ TV documentary Thatcher – Ireland and the Iron Lady, Maginnis revealed he met the British Prime Minister in the wake of an IRA ambush on a military vehicle at Ballygawley in County Tyrone that left eight British soldiers dead.

He revealed that he gave Thatcher the names of three IRA Volunteers – brothers Gerard and Martin Harte and Brian Mullin – as those he suspected of involvement in the Ballygawley ambush.

Lord Maginnis (above) told this week's TV programme that "subsequently, there was an SAS operation and they were ambushed", gloatingly adding: "That was the end of that particular team."

The former MP was not challenged by the programme makers to produce evidence linking the trio to the August 1988 attack.

Reacting to Maginnis’s revelation this week, West Tyrone Sinn Féin MLA Declan McAleer said:

"This admission, straight from the horse’s mouth, clearly shows that the British Government, with the collaboration of the Ulster Unionist Party, were responsible for targeting and executing people.

“It confirms what republicans have been saying for years – that those at the highest levels of the British Government were involved in targeting and assassinating republicans, solicitors and anyone else who challenged their remit in Ireland.”

THIS isn’t the first time the former British Army officer has been embroiled in a row over his glib attitude on an RTÉ programme to the deaths of republicans.

Appearing on RTÉ’s Late Late Show in the early 1980s, Bernadette McAliskey challenged Maginnis who gleefully said after the 1983 killings of Volunteers Brian Campbell and Colm McGirr that "two swallows do not make a summer".