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Statement by John Weir 3rd February 1999   

1. I am a former member of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) which I joined in 1970 and served until 1980. After initial training in Enniskillen Training Depot, I began my police career in Strandtown RUC Station in East Belfast.   

2. I left the RUC in 1980 following my conviction for the murder of William Strathearn at Ahoghill, Co. Antrim, which occurred in April 1977. I will deal with this incident later in this statement. (See paragraphs 33-38)   

3. I recall that in 1970 or 1971, while I was serving as a young constable, aged 20, in Strandtown there was an arms amnesty in which members of the public handed in substantial quantities of guns and ammunition of different types. Many of these guns were then given out by RUC officers to local members of a Loyalist paramilitary organization, the Ulster Defence Association, with the knowledge of the senior officers in my station. On one occasion I was ordered by Inspector Don Milligan to remove a number of rifles which had been handed in under the amnesty, and place them in the boot of his car. I do not know where he took them but it was common knowledge among my colleagues that such weapons were being given to Loyalists whom my colleagues supported.   

4. In 1972, I was transferred to Armagh RUC station and I served in a specialist anti-terrorist unit, the Special Patrol Group (SPG), in Armagh for the following two years or more. This involved me in police work related to the political unrest in Northern Ireland and especially combatting IRA terrorism. For example, my duties included making early morning  
arrests, attending the scenes of bombings and shootings and riot control. I quickly discovered that many members of my SPG unit had Loyalists connections and supported the activities of Loyalist paramilitaries. I recall that, during the Ulster workers Strike in 1974 all members of my SPG unit fully supported the Loyalist efforts to bring down the power-sharing Executive and we toured the barricades and encouraged the strikers to persevere. When my colleagues and I learned that we were going to be sent to Portadown to contain Loyalist protests, we sabotaged our own police vehicles by putting sugar in petrol tanks and disabling our vehicles. As a result we were not sent to Portadown. My SPG had about thirty members, of whom 29 were Protestant and the only one Catholic, Maurice Coyle, who resigned and emigrated to Canada.   

5. It is important to make it clear that my SPG unit, following Coyle's departure, was entirely Protestant and committed to the Loyalist cause. Each SPG unit had a call sign, which used each colour as a call sign; my unit's call sign was 'Orange.'The SPG Commander for the whole of Northern Ireland, Superintendent Killen, made a joke of this on a visit to Armagh when he showed his knowledge of our unit, saying that our colour was appropriate as we were basically an Orange Lodge.   

6. The area we were responsible for patrolling included the whole of South Armagh and, on, the whole of south Down. I recall one incident near Glenanne in South Armagh, when I was on patrol with a Constable Moorcroft. We were called to a shooting incident which had occurred at Glenanne Lake and Mowhan village, the incident involved others members of our SPG unit and had led to the accidental death of two British soldiers, shot in error by my colleagues. I recall that, on the way to the scene of the incident, Constable Tom Moorcroft told me that he was concerned in case the dead men would turn out to be Loyalist paramilitaries operating in the area. He mentioned the name of one such paramilitary, James  Mitchell, who was also a member of the RUC Reserve in Markethill at that time. This incident confirmed my growing realization that the security forces were involved in Loyalist terrorism.   

7. I recall a visit to my SPG unit by RUC Assistant Chief Constable Charlie Rodgers, who asked us for our views on how best to combat the rise in IRA activity in south Armagh. South Armagh was, at that time, an area which was experiencing much terrorist activity from both sides. Loyalist and republican. We used the opportunity presented by Rodgers' visit to express some extreme solutions to the problem, such as that we use commercial lorries with armored plating which would enable us to remove illegal IRA roadblocks by shooting everyone dead, or that we should perform road stops wearing civilian clothes and carrying illegal weapons, pretending to be either UVF or IRA units, thereby learning the true allegiance of those we had stopped. ACC Rodgers expressed his support for these proposals and other extreme measures, with the result that some of us later implemented them. One of my colleagues, who later murdered an innocent Catholic, tried to justify his action by saying that Charlie Rodgers, on one of his visits to Armagh SPG, had authorized an RUC shoot-to-kill policy.   

8. I recall that in 1974, towards the end of my time in Armagh SPG, I was having a drink with a girlfriend in Norman's Bar in Moira, Co. Armagh, when we were bought drinks by two men in the pub. We had an easy conversation and one of the men, who had already known my name, told me he had heard good reports about me and knew me to be sympathetic to the Loyalists. They left within fifteen minutes and I made inquiries as to who they were. That was the first time I ever met Robin Jackson and R.J. Kerr, two Loyalist paramilitaries, whom I would later come to know well. I assumed that one of my SPG colleagues had previously informed these men that I would be useful to their cause.   

9. Two murders in 1974 and 1975 led to my transfer from Armagh SPG to another SPG unit in Castlereagh, Belfast. The IRA had murdered an Ulster Defence Regiment officer called Elliott. After his death, I received information that he had been held and murdered at the home of Jimmy Carville. At Mollyash, Castleblaney, across the border in Co. Monaghan.  
I passed this information on to Sergeant John Poland in RUC Special Branch camp in Armagh. A short time later John Francis Greene, a known IRA man who was on the run from Lurgan, Co. Armagh, was shot dead in Jimmy Carville's house. I later learned that my name was being linked to the second murder and that rumours were circulating that I had organized the murder of John Francis Greene, in retaliation for the Elliott murder. Although this was untrue, these rumours put me at additional risk from the IRA and as a result, I was transferred to Belfast. I later became aware that the Greene murder had been committed by an Ulster Defence Regiment {UDR} soldier Robert McConnell, and by one of the men I had met in Norman's Bar, the Loyalist paramilitary Robin Jackson.   

10. Some time after my transfer to Belfast, I received a visit from two of my former colleagues in Armagh SPG, Gary Armstrong and Ian Mitchell. They told me that ACC Rodgers had spoken to their unit once more and that they had expressed their view to him that a drastic change of policy was necessary to combat the IRA more effectively in South  Armagh. They told me that they had decided for themselves, as a result of the discussions stimulated by his visits, that the time had come to take direct action against not merely known Republicans or IRA activists but against the Catholic population in general. I agreed with them that the only way to stop the IRA murder campaign was to attack the Catholic    community itself, so that it would put pressure on the IRA to call off its campaign. After I had indicated my interest in their plans, Armstrong and Mitchell informed me that they had already begun to implement them. They had started their campaign by carrying out a bomb and gun attack near Keady village, in June 1976, at the Rock Bar which is located within yards of the border with the Irish Republic.