McGuinness 'Knew Bank Was Targeted'

The Stormont Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness was one of two leading republicans who were aware in advance of a huge IRA bank robbery in Belfast that almost scuppered the then fragile 'peace process'.

However, Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams and Mr McGuinness have this morning rejected accusations that they knew in advance of the huge robbery.

Their rejections comes after leaked correspondence from the USA has highlighted the former Irish Taoiseach Berte Ahern's concerns about Sinn Fein and the IRA.

Secret cables described a challenging period in the peace process as London and Dublin sought to restore the power-sharing executive in Northern Ireland.

Unionist suspicions about the intentions of the republican movement were fuelled when the IRA robbed the headquarters of Northern Bank in Belfast in December 2004.

This claim has been levelled before as the International Monitoring Commission (IMC) said the IRA was behind the 2004 Northern Bank robbery and that senior members of Sinn Fein had sanctioned the raid.

In its fourth report, specially published as a result of the £26.5 million heist, the IMC said that while Sinn Fein continually said it was opposed to criminality of any kind "it appeared at times to have its own definition of what constitutes a crime".

"We have carefully scrutinised all the material of different kinds that has become available to us since the robbery, which leads us to conclude firmly that it was planned and undertaken by the PIRA," the report said at the time.

Now, it has emerged that a cable on 4 February 2005 from the US ambassador to Dublin, James Kenny, reported that a senior Irish government official told the Embassy of the Taoiseach's concerns about Adams and McGuinness.

The cable claimed the official wrote "the government of Ireland does have 'rock solid evidence' that Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness are members of the IRA military command and for that reason, the Taoiseach is certain they would have known in advance of the robbery".

In another cable on 1 June 2005, six months after the robbery, Kenny reported that Ahern had raised his concerns with Mitchell Reiss, the US envoy to Ireland.

The cable says: "The Taoiseach … believes Sinn Fein leaders were aware of plans to rob the Northern Bank even as they negotiated with him last fall".

However, this morning, a joint statement has said: "Martin McGuinness and I both absolutely rejected these unfounded allegations at the time and do so again today.

"We publicly and privately challenged the Taoiseach to produce evidence to support his allegations. He didn't," it said. "We told him they were groundless and untrue."

The statement goes on to blame party political purposes for the assertions: "It was and is my view that this had more to do with the electoral rivalries between Sinn Fein and Fianna Fail.

"Subsequently I met the Taoiseach and he produced no evidence to support his accusations," the republican statement continued.

Also contained in the leaks was the that the Gardaí believed the IRA used the Republic's so-called 'Celtic Tiger' economic boom to diversify into "more sophisticated business enterprises" by buying up properties in London, Dublin and Spanish resorts.

A senior Irish police officer told the American embassy in Dublin that the IRA used the booming Irish economy to move on from 1970s-style racketeering as it turned to "apparently respectable businessmen" to raise funds.

The claims were in secret messages, obtained by the Wikileaks website, date from 2005 and were published in the Guardian today.

See: SF members sanctioned robbery – IMC report

(BMcC/GK)