Victims let down over OTRs scheme - report

The British government let down victims of violence and their families in the administration of the controversial "on-the-runs" scheme, according to a report issued this morning.

The Northern Ireland Affairs Committee called the OTRs questionably unlawful and said the committee believes the scheme distorted the legal process.

Committee chairman Laurence Robertson MP said that while questionable that any such scheme should have been put in place; when it was in place it should have been properly introduced and correctly administered and this scheme was neither.

The investigation is the second such inquiry into the scheme, which hit the headlines last year after the case of John Downey collapsed in a London Court.

Mr Downey had been charged in relation to the 1982 Hyde Park bombing in London in which four soldiers died.

The judge in that case had been told that the defendant had received a so-called comfort letter telling him he was no longer being pursued by the UK authorities.

As a result the case did not go ahead.

The committee carried out its own inquiry into the scheme after concerns that a previous investigation had been too narrow in its scope.

Among those to give evidence to the committee was former Northern secretary Peter Hain and current Northern Secretary Theresa Villiers.

Former Labour prime minister Tony Blair also gave evidence to the inquiry in January.

In its report, the committee accepted that the deal took place as part of a difficult peace process but said there should still have been transparency and accountability in the administration of such a scheme.

The committee said it is hard to understand how anyone could have believed that writing such comfort letters to innocent people could have saved the peace process and said that if the people were not suspected of anything then there would have been no issue.

The report expresses alarm at the fact that the PSNI believes that up to 95 people who received letters were connected by British intelligence to almost 300 murders.

It calls for the British government to provide the resources to reassess those cases quickly.

The report makes clear that the committee has not been given access to the names of other people who received OTRs letters and says that a number of the committee's members feel the names should be published provided that publication would not prejudice any future trial.

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