IRA followers helped to train Colombian terrorists: general

By RUPERT CORNWELL in Washington

Colombia's top general yesterday said that in past years at least seven individuals with links to the IRA had been in the country helping train members of the Farc terrorist movement.

They included three who were arrested last August and are now awaiting trial.

General Fernando Tapias, chairman of Colombia's joint chiefs of staff, told a United States congressional committee that the IRA figures had helped Farc with sophisticated explosive techniques and the production of "non-conventional" arms and other weapons "to wage guerrilla warfare".

In testimony that will deeply embarrass the IRA and its political wing Sinn Fein, Tapias told the House international relations committee that he did not know whether the seven had been in Farc strongholds in southern Colombia as representatives of the IRA or in their "personal capacity".

But he insisted: "We have facts linking these people to training procedures, buttressing the terrorist activities of Farc."

Yesterday the IRA leadership denied sending any of its men to train or engage with any group in Colombia.

Echoing a similar categorical denial by Sinn Fein chairman Gerry Adams, who refused an invitation to testify at the hearing, the republican group said: "The IRA has not interfered in the internal affairs of Colombia and will not do so.

"The IRA is fully committed to a successful outcome of the Irish peace process."

It added: "The threat to that process does not come from the IRA."

Those arrested are Niall Connolly, who Gerry Adams last year admitted was Sinn Fein's representative in Cuba, and James Monaghan and Martin McCauley, who Tapias said were the head and deputy head of the IRA's "engineering division", in charge of explosives.

Two others were identified in a dossier compiled by the Colombian armed forces under the aliases of John Francis Johnston and James Edward Walker.

They visited territory controlled by Farc in April last year and returned to Paris the same month.

The other two, says the dossier, were captured but released for lack of evidence. They were Margret Osk Steindordsdottir and Kawin Neol Creenle.

Yesterday's hearing followed publication of a summary of a report on the House committee's nine-month investigation into links between the Farc, the largest terrorist organisation in the Western hemisphere, and the IRA.

It asserts that the IRA operated as part of an international terrorist scheme to train Farc guerrillas, working with Iranians, Cubans and possibly members of the ETA Basque separatist group.

Its services were paid for by revenue from Colombia's drug trade.

Colombia, the report said, was a potential breeding area for international terrorism "equalled perhaps only by Afghanistan".

It speculated that five to 15 people suspected of links with the IRA had been in the country since 1998.

The report suggested that IRA expertise had helped make Farc more proficient with explosives.

Congressmen sympathetic to the Irish Republican cause furiously assailed both the report and the fact that the hearing was held at all.

They said the Ulster peace process would be damaged at a delicate stage.

The report, they charged, was mere speculation and surmise, and could only prejudice the trial of the three suspected IRA members, likely to start in a few weeks.

New York Republican Peter King said there was no credible evidence to suggest the IRA high command had sanctioned the men's activities.



But committee chairman Henry Hyde said the evidence pointed to an IRA presence in Colombia for at least three years.

To claim the three facing trial were there "for eco-tourism or activities relating to the Irish and Colombian peace processes" were "an insult to our intelligence".

- INDEPENDENT