N. Ireland investigative journalist slain; Protestant group claims responsibility
By The Associated Press,
freedomforum.org staff
10.01.01
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| Martin O'Hagan |
BELFAST, Northern Ireland — Martin O'Hagan, a prominent Catholic investigative journalist, was fatally shot late last week, and a shadowy Protestant group has claimed responsibility.
O’Hagan, 51, worked for the Sunday World newspaper of Dublin. The Northern Ireland secretary described the attack as a “barbaric killing.” O’Hagan’s editor said it was “shocking in the extreme."
A caller claiming to represent the "Red Hand Defenders" told the British Broadcasting Corp. over the weekend that O'Hagan had been assassinated for “crimes” against Protestant militants. The reference evidently was to O’Hagan’s work exposing the murders, drug-dealing and other criminal rackets reportedly run by the Protestant paramilitary underworld.
The BBC quoted one of O’Hagan’s colleagues as saying, “He enjoyed exposing terrorism."
Police said that “Red Hand Defenders” is a name frequently used as cover by two established outlawed groups, the Ulster Defense Association and the Loyalist Volunteer Force, both of which are officially observing truces but have been linked to a wave of attacks on Catholics this year.
The Loyalist Volunteers draw support from hard-line Protestant neighborhoods and had previously threatened to kill O’Hagan for his reports.
The BBC reported that O’Hagan “had recently been working on a number of stories involving [Loyalist Volunteer Force] members."
Police said the deadly attack happened late Sept. 28. O'Hagan was shot at least twice by a gunman in a passing car as he walked from a pub in his hometown of Lurgan. His wife, Marie, was with him but wasn’t wounded. O’Hagan was reported to have pushed her into a hedge to protect her.
The vehicle was found on fire, several hundred yards from the O’Hagan home.
O’Hagan had fled Northern Ireland in 1993 after the newspaper’s Belfast office was bombed. He had also received a death threat from Billy Wright, who later founded the Loyalist Volunteer Force.
His editor, Jim McDowell, said O’Hagan had felt sufficiently safe to live in Lurgan after Wright was killed in prison in 1997 and after the Loyalist Volunteers called a cease-fire in 1998. O'Hagan — who coined headline-grabbing nicknames for many senior militants — had christened Wright “King Rat” and his Loyalist Volunteer underlings the “Rat pack."
“We've faced many threats before,'' said McDowell, whose predecessor as northern editor of the Sunday World was shot and seriously wounded by Protestant militants two decades ago. “But this is shocking in the extreme, because we had no inkling of any threat."
Protestant and Catholic politicians united to condemn the slaying. Northern Ireland Secretary John Reid, who described the shooting as a “barbaric killing,” was quoted by the BBC as saying he was determined to track down O’Hagan’s killers.
The slaying, Reid said, “shows contempt for human life, contempt for the freedom of the press and contempt for the people of Northern Ireland."
The BBC noted that O’Hagan’s killing “has disturbing parallels with the murder of Veronica Guerin in Dublin five years ago."
Guerin, a prominent reporter for Dublin’s Sunday Independent who investigated organized crime, was killed June 26, 1996, outside Dublin as she waited in her car at a traffic light. Her assailant shot her from the back of a motorcycle.
Guerin was killed two days before she was to speak at a Freedom Forum conference in London. The topic of her segment was to have been "Dying to Tell the Story: Journalists at Risk."
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