The New Lodge Six Community Inquiry

BY ÁINE NÍ BHRIAN


     
The New Lodge community have always felt that the army regiment involved planned to attack them prior to being withdrawn from the area at the end of their tour of duty
This past weekend there was a public community inquiry into the shooting deaths of six young men at the hands of the British Army in February of 1973.

The men, known collectively as the New Lodge Six, were unarmed when they were murdered but immediately after their deaths the army issued a statement claiming to have shot dead six gunmen in a fierce gun battle on the New Lodge Road. It was a lie then and it is a lie now.

The evening of 3 February 1972 had been quiet. Jim McCann and Jim Sloan were on their way home from Lynch's bar at the corner of the Antrim and New Lodge Roads, when a car came speeding out of the Tiger's Bay estate via Halliday's Road.

The car, a dark-coloured Austin Morris, had no headlights on and contained at least two people. Witnesses later said they had gotten the distinct impression the occupants were military personnel because of their short haircuts and the way they seemed to operate with a kind of "precision". The car was also lower to the ground than it would normally be, which seemed to imply it could have been an armored military vehicle disguised to look like a civilian one.

In any case, the passenger in the rear of the car opened fire on the two young men, raking them with machine gun fire. The car continued down the Antrim road while the shooter fired into a Chinese restaurant, injuring several others. It then did a U-turn directly in front of Girdwood barracks and raced back in the direction it had come, passing a British Army Saracen as it went, which did nothing to stop it.

Sometime later the vehicle was found in front of the Tennent Street RUC barracks in the Shankill, but that night as it sped away down the Antrim Road it had gone back into the Tiger's Bay estate. 9mm casings were found in its burnt out shell - standard British Army issue. Questions remain as to why no one was seen leaving it in front of a highly secure police barracks that was decked out with state of the art surveillance equipment.

Within half an hour of the shootings of McCann and Sloan, the British Army suddenly opened fire on the New Lodge Road from their positions at Duncairn Gardens and observation posts atop Artillery flats. There had been no rioting on the road at the time, no one had been engaging the security forces. As one witness told the inquiry this week, the army simply "shot them like rabbits".

When the shooting finally stopped in the morning of 4 February 1973, six men were dead and several people wounded. They included Jim McCann and Jim Sloan, the first two to have been shot that night, and four others who were shot on the New Lodge Road - Tony (TC) Campbell, Brendan Maguire, John Loughran, and Ambrose Hardy.

Many who were killed that night were in the process of trying to rescue others who lay wounded on the street, and Ambrose Hardy was shot in the head while he waved a white petticoat during a momentary lull in the shooting and looked around the corner to see if the coast was clear.

The British Army immediately issued a statement saying that they had shot dead six gunmen in a fierce gun battle on the New Lodge Road.

In spite of this assertion, not one of those killed that night was armed. In fact, no weapons of any kind were ever found. No one was detained, no investigation was carried out, no evidence collected, no searches conducted and not one witnesses was questioned. In the aftermath of the shooting, one would expect that, had there been a gun battle, the area would have been saturated with security forces. It wasn't.

Unarmed victims

During the course of the current inquiry, every single witness was adamant that not one of the dead had a weapon or even anything that could even be construed as a weapon. They are equally sure that no fire was being returned from the road and that it was only military guns that were doing the shooting.

"How can you be sure of that?" several were asked. The answer was always the same:

"Because you heard a lot of gunfire in this part of Belfast then and the army's guns had a very distinctive sound to them.

"At that time you could tell the difference between the sound of army weapons and the weapons of the IRA."

The shootings were vicious and relentless.

One witness had been just 16 years of age when the killings occurred. She trembled and fought tears as she told how she and others had tried to tend to her mortally wounded friend, TC Campbell.

"He was crying and calling for his mommie," she said. "He kept asking for roses at his funeral. There was a sucking, gurgling noise coming from the wound in his stomach. I'll never forget that sound - we couldn't stop the blood."

TC had been shot 17 times. One bullet had hit his spine, another severed his main artery, just above his belt. He had been out celebrating his 19th birthday when the shooting began and had helped several people to safety before he was shot at the corner of the New Lodge and Edlingham Street.

Many of the rest of those killed and injured that night had been in the process of trying to pull his shattered and bleeding body to cover.

John Loughran left his home and went into the line of fire no less than four times to rescue the injured. He was killed as he tried to crawl towards TC. He was the father of three children and died with his fourth on the way.

John's widow told the inquiry this week how she and John's mother never recovered from his loss. "The heart was tore out of us," she said. "His mother relived it everyday."

For some time after the murders, the families of those killed were harassed by both civilians and the security forces themselves. They were subjected to ridicule, threat and insult. The mother of 33-year-old Brendan Maguire, for example, was regularly followed home from chapel by soldiers in jeeps who taunted her relentlessly about the murder of her son. She was finally forced to go to another church in order to avoid them.

The families of the New Lodge Six challenged the Army claim that their loved ones were gunmen and won their case. Evidence was produced that proved five of the men had no traces of lead on their person whatsoever and that the sixth had probably been positive due only to the presence of the bullets he had been shot with.

They were awarded some limited monetary 'compensation' but the amounts only served to add insult to injury. The family of 25-year-old Ambrose Hardy were awarded just £90 for his loss. "But," his brother told the inquiry, "money had nothing to do with it. We took the action to clear his name. He was innocent and he was shot."

At first the family of John Loughran was refused compensation. When they were finally awarded a settlement, the court stated that while John had been acting as a "good Samaritan", his actions had been "foolish". This remark only added further to his family's suffering and this past week a member of the inquiry's sitting panel pointedly remarked that had John been a serviceman taking the same action, he'd have been awarded a medal and honoured as a hero.

Six months after the shootings, the Daily Mirror newspaper issued an apology for printing the army's version of events in the aftermath of the killings. It came in the form of a small paragraph buried deep within its pages, in stark contrast to the original front page headline that had appeared the morning after the incident occurred.

Although the paper half-heartedly retracted its lie, the army and Ministry of Defence never have. Nor has the military given any account of the events of that night, save its original assertion. In fact, when contacted for comment just prior to this inquiry, a British Army press officer told a journalist from the North Belfast News who was asking about the murders to "fuck off".

He went on to tell the amazed reporter, "there's no fucking way we work to your rules, you know the score".

The State response to the New Lodge Six inquiry is consistent with what nationalists in the Six Counties have long understood - that the British state and its security forces feel above the law, that they can act with impunity, without fear of retribution. And for the most part, history has taught us they can and have - because sadly the murders of the New Lodge Six are not an isolated incident. The events of that night have startling similarities to the killings on Bloody Sunday and the Springhill Massacre, to name just a few.

All three incidents saw state forces opening fire, without warning or provocation, from secure positions, on unarmed civilians and shooting at anything that moved. All three resulted in the deaths of many people and all three also saw an attempted cover-up after the killings, with the issuance of misinformation and outright lies as a means to justify the illegal and immoral slaughter of innocent people.

This weekend, after listening to the testimony of several of the witnesses, one of the jurists stated quietly that "we (the panel) are staggered at the enormity of events. It was simply a grotesque massacre."

Premeditated killings

Meanwhile, both the army and the MoD have thus far refused to hand over documents relevant to the New Lodge Six case, in an act of further obstruction. Their actions are consistent with a purposeful and deliberate pattern of behavior by the British state towards the nationalist people over the course of the last 30 years. This pattern includes what Father Des Wilson described at the inquiry as "politically motivated killings".

The New Lodge community have always felt that the army regiment involved planned to attack them prior to being withdrawn from the area at the end of their tour of duty. Many also feel it is no coincidence that the night of the murders was also the first time the army had night vision scopes on their weapons. During the course of the inquiry, several witnesses recalled sinister remarks made to them by members of the crown forces just prior to the shootings.

One recounted how he had been stopped by members of the Queen's Own Regiment earlier that very week. He told how a senior officer had said to him; "We're gonna get you on the weekend."

"Did you take that to mean you personally?" he was asked.

"I didn‚t know," he answered. "I took it as a threat to the whole community. At the end of the day, that's what it turned out to be."

Another witness echoed his account. John Loughran's brother Willie told the hushed hall how he had been stopped as he walked past a foot patrol on the New Lodge Road. A soldier approached him and asked, "Where's John?"

"Go round to the house and ask him," his brother replied angrily. "Oh, there's no hurry," said the soldier. "We'll get him in our own time."

"He said that to me on Tuesday," Willie recalled. "On Saturday, John was dead."

Preliminary findings

At the conclusion of the emotional and moving inquiry, the panel of international jurists - all of whom have exhaustive experience in criminal and civil liberties law, human rights and constitutional law - issued a two-page statement of their preliminary findings (a formal report is scheduled to be issued by year end).

The panel said they wished to express their shock at "the State's total failure to investigate the circumstances surrounding the deaths of the six victims and the wounding of several others" and called upon "all relevant agents of the UK Government to assist us by releasing to this community inquiry, documentation relating to these events".

They also stated that there had been "a clear breach of Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights - the right to life..." and that "there is no evidence to indicate that any of the deceased and wounded were armed at the time of their shooting or acting in a manner which might have been interpreted as a potential threat to the security forces".

They went on to express their concern about the lack of public awareness of the case and said that "serious questions remain" as to whether the shooting of Jim McCann and Jim Sloan was carried out by loyalists acting alone or in collusion with the crown forces. "Indeed," they added, "there is evidence that the car from which the shots were fired may have been occupied by members of the security forces."

The families' loss

This February, it will have been 30 years since the murders of the New Lodge Six. Their loss is still profoundly felt and their families have suffered greatly.

Charlie Carson, who survived the attack, was asked by the inquiry whether his community had had anyone to turn to for answers or justice after the killings.

"No one wanted to listen, no one wanted to know," he said. "We were just bodies to those people."

The British state and its forces continue to show nothing but utter contempt for the families of the victims and the New Lodge community at large. They, like many others in the Six Counties, deserve the truth. They deserve answers, they deserve justice and at the very least, they deserve acknowledgment.