UK: MI5 in Scottish Court
01 January 1996
Three members of MI5, the Security Service, including one woman, gave evidence from behind screens for the first time in a Scottish court in December. They were giving evidence about their surveillance of the six men accused, and convicting of plotting to smuggle two guns and 33 rounds of ammunition to the UVF. Among the six was Lindsay Robb of the Progressive Unionist Party who was part of the loyalist delegation involved in peace talks, attending some eleven meetings with the government. According to Severin Carrell of The Scotsman newspaper senior Scottish police were very concerned about the poor quality of evidence provided by the MI5 witnesses. Carrell reported, "the first wrongly identified one accused as having light brown hair, a goatee and earrings and being 30 to 35 years. The accused was 44, clean shaven, had grey receding hair and no earrings." Such a poor performance bolsters the argument of those who oppose the extension of MI5 into traditional areas of police work on grounds of lack of training in evidence gathering. Another interesting aspect of the case was that, although the MI5 officers were screened from press and public, they were not screened from the defendants because Scottish judges believe that defendants have a right to see their accusers.
Ironically, Lindsay Robb himself had recently given evidence from behind a screen in a murder trial in Northern Ireland, only on this occasion, witnesses were fully screened. Robb was one of two eye-witnesses in the trial of Colin Duffy, sentenced to life imprisonment last July on a charge of murdering a former Ulster Defence Regiment sergeant in June 1993. Although directly contradicted by other eye-witnesses, a person (not Robb) informed the RUC that Duffy was one of the killers even though he was at the time of the killing at his mother-in-law's house with his daughter. Some time after Duffy's arrest became public knowledge, Robb used the confidential telephone to tell the RUC that he could identify Duffy as one of the killers even though there was no evidence that he had met him since he was 16 (and even this meeting is in doubt). Notwithstanding his alibi and the dubious eye-witness evidence, Duffy was found guilty by the Diplock court judge.
Following the trial, Robb was advised by the RUC that he might be an IRA target, even if there was a ceasefire. The RUC supplied him with ?2,000 and a personal firearm, and he left for Scotland. This may have been part of an attempt to "neutralise" Robb. At one of the government/loyalist meetings in the summer of 1995, Robb read out an uncompromising statement from the mid-Ulster UVF and it is thought that he was put under close surveillance afterwards.
Spotlight, BBC Northern Ireland, 8.2.96; The Scotsman, 23.11.95 & 21.12.95.ste.mob