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Showing posts with label Journalist Under Threat. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Journalist Under Threat. Show all posts
Anthony McIntyre ☠ Last month, the office of the North's Public Prosecution Service became a crime scene. 

Rather than being a prime mover in investigations, the PPS should now be considered a prime suspect. Its ludicrous decision not to prosecute the sinister persona behind online threats to the journalist Patricia Devlin and her baby has been described as disappointing and devastating by the targeted writer and podcaster. 

The threat sent via Facebook three years ago included a vile statement of intent to rape her baby son.

Not only has one of the country's best investigative journalists been abandoned by the PPS but children have been thrown under the bus as a result of the decision. Fiends who threaten to rape children - in this case for the purpose of terrifying a journalist into silence - can legitimately be viewed as posing a serious paedophilic risk to the youngest in any society. Yet, for some reason the particular thug in the Devlin case can carry on unmolested to continue with his threats to molest the very young. 

The PPS said that while the threats were grossly offensive and menacing, there was insufficient evidence. Since when did a direct and traceable threat to rape not become sufficient evidence? In all circumstances bar none when the authorities become aware of a serious threat of, or incitement to violence online or off, and can identify those culpable but still fail to prosecute, the salient conclusion nominates itself: the person behind the threat is a protected asset, the police preferring them on the streets for reasons best known to themselves. It might not transpire that such a person is on the books of the cops but it is the most likely explanation and will remain as such until a more plausible one presents itself. 

For over nine years the PPS and PSNI have conspired between them on the basis of insufficient evidence in a bid to secure the successful prosecution of the West Belfast republican Alex McCrory until a judge, not they, concluded their evidence was not fit for purpose - and found McCrory not guilty. So determined is the PPS to be wrong, it is now considering appealing the decision in the McCrory case. Weak evidence will do just fine against him but becomes insufficient against someone who seems to have a certain use value to the police. 

Following the threat, Patricia Devlin complained when her concerns for both herself and her baby were slipped into the 'nothing to see here' folder by the PSNI. Her complaint was upheld by the Police Ombudsman and the case was reinvestigated. The ombudsman was highly critical of the PSNI for having 'failed to take appropriate measures to secure the arrest of the suspect, who lived in another part of the UK.' Really inaccessible those other parts of the UK to Plod and Percy. 

After I made the complaint to the Police Ombudsman, the PSNI then reinvestigated my original complaint and that individual was eventually questioned, the person they said (the PSNI) they tracked the message to.
I was told I would have to wait for a decision from the PPS. That took almost a year and a half for a decision to be made.
Now I have been told that there isn't enough evidence for a prosecution which is absolutely devastating.
I feel again that I wasn't protected, that my son hasn't been protected.

Amnesty International has criticised the PPS decision:

We’re very concerned at this decision not to bring forward a prosecution of the person believed to be behind these appalling threats to Patricia Devlin and her baby.
For three-and-half years, Patricia has sought justice for the vile threats made against her new-born baby, just one of countless threats she’s had to endure. She’s been let down repeatedly, first by an inadequate police investigation and now by a failure to prosecute.
If the case is considered a litmus test over whether Northern Ireland’s criminal justice system will protect journalists from intimidation, then we must conclude that it is failing.

It is designed to fail for journalists and succeed for assets. Everyone but the PSNI and those with whom they collude inside the PPS can see this. Now the PPS claims it is keen to meet with the victim of its own malfeasance, Ms Devlin. To what avail? It shafted her and now wants to whisper weasel words as compensation. The offer is insult added to injury. 

Patricia Devlin rightly sums up the dangerous dilemma she has been left in.  

The question is - is there any point in me making complaints to the police if I receive abuse again even on this scale? Because nothing seems to be done.

Patricia Devlin has shone the same forensic light on the gangsters of loyalism that Sam McBride shines on the charlatans of Stormont. Both have been subject to attempts at silencing them. Amnesty International has said that:

Threats designed to shut down press scrutiny of criminal and paramilitary activity cannot be allowed to succeed in undermining press freedom in Northern Ireland.

Whether in the sordid world of paramilitaries or the sleazy world of parliamentarians, 'the job of the journalist is to say: What does it really mean?' Those intent on being at best mean to journalists, and at worst lethal to those who ask that question, will have raised their glasses to their allies in the PPS and the PSNI on learning of last month's decision. 

⏩Follow on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre.

Prime Suspect

Anthony McIntyre  ✒ It was heartening but not surprising to learn that the Police Ombudsman in the North has upheld a complaint by the journalist Patricia Devlin that there was "a complete failure" on the part of the PSNI to seriously investigate a complaint she had lodged. 

After a loyalist paedophile, thought to have links to the Ulster Drugs Association (UDA), made online threats to rape her baby the Sunday World journalist reported the incident to the PSNI.  

It did not require the Police Ombudsman to describe the threat as repulsive in order to convince anybody. Most, with the seeming exception of the PSNI, were aware just how vile and sinister it was.

The ombudsman also said it was "concerning that police failed to take measures to arrest the suspect at the earliest opportunity". 

Less diplomatically, the PSNI simply did not give one flying fuck that a journalist at the coal face of investigating the most dangerous of thugs, was subject to this type of intimidation / harassment or that her child was threatened.

You're going to the people who are there to protect you and carry out appropriate investigations … I've had sleepless nights, I've had nightmares that no mother should ever have, I felt isolated, I felt hopeless and I felt that no one's been listening to me.

Ms. Devlin's solicitor, Kevin Winters, described the PSNI handling of the matter as one of selective incompetence. If only we could be so certain that incompetence explains it. There has to be in the mix the possibility that the paedophile was working for one of the police services, in the North or across the water, providing information on his fellow gangsters. Keeping him in place rather than protecting mothers and babies from him might have been a priority of the policing agencies. 

Last year Patricia Devlin spoke to TPQ about the harrowing experience. She raised the very real possibility that something other than incompetence might have been a factor.

TPQ: It has been a rough time for you. UDA gangsters have been putting you through the mill with death threats because of your reporting. It is bad enough that a journalist is threatened for doing their job but when the threats extend to undertaking to rape your baby that causes a shudder. While most likely a paedophile within the UDA using the hate that has been orchestrated against you as an opportunity to advance his own fantasies, it is no less sinister for that. I have been around the block in terms of threats and loyalist death attempts, and I find it chilling. While I guess many would see me as good value for it given my own past involvement in the IRA, you are a mother of three children, a journalist doing your job. You are not a member of some rival drug cartel to the UDA, out to steal their profit and muscle in on their turf. What has it been like for you to be hurled into the eye of the storm?

PD: Not a parent on this planet could honestly say they wouldn’t find a rape threat to their child traumatising. The moment I opened up the message, which was sent to my private Facebook account, I felt physically sick. That sickness did not leave for many, many months, and to be honest, it’s still there to some extent. I find it very hard to comprehend how anyone could allow those thoughts to enter their mind, let alone sit down and type them out.

This person actually looked at a picture of me holding my little boy - a newborn - in my arms on my profile before hitting send. That thought still chills me. My grandmother was also mentioned in the message along with what they thought was the location of where she lived. It was signed off ‘Combat 18’, a neo-Nazi terror group with past links to loyalists paramilitaries here. It was a short message but every single word was carefully selected to terrorise and intimidate me and my family. This was someone who was extremely twisted and quite obviously dangerous.

The only chink of light out of it was, the message was sent over social media, where you are never truly anonymous.

As soon as I received it, I contacted the PSNI, with the belief this individual would be tracked down and arrested as a matter of urgency.

They were traced, I know the individual who sent me the message, as the police told me.

But today, 17 months on, he has not even been questioned let alone arrested.

TPQ: Appalling stuff, nothing short of the fiendish outworking of a perverse hatred. One of the more worrying aspects of it is that we instinctively sense that the type of person who could write that is also the type who could follow through on it. That he is still free to pose that threat to you and your child defies common sense. It smells of a protected species working for one of the state agencies. Why else is a vile creature like that not in jail? This is akin to what Mexican drug cartels get up to – they deliberately target those you love to instill terror. Here we have your baby and your grandmother introduced into the strategy of threat, yet nothing from the PSNI. Despite Simon Byrne waxing concern during the week journalist safety is not high on the list of his force’s priorities. Given its unrelenting pursuit of Trevor Birney and Barry McCaffrey, we have to assume that the PSNI regard journalists as the threat.

PD: One of the questions that must be asked of the PSNI is, does this individual have some sort of protection from arrest and prosecution? That is a fair enough question to ask considering the evidence against him and the failure by police to adequately pursue him for questioning. He is someone suspected of previously being involved in paramilitary violence and has been questioned by police at least once on a murder carried out by a loyalist gang. He has a serious criminal record and has not only been on the PSNI’s radar for quite a while, but that of other police forces.

Three months following my complaint to police, he left Northern Ireland and moved to Scotland.

He remained there until late 2020, which was over a year after I made the formal statement to police.

The week I went public on my decision to file a Police Ombudsman complaint on what I believed to be failings in the PSN’s investigation, he disappeared. From my own sources, which I have had to resort to relying on throughout this process instead of the police, I am now aware he is living in mainland Europe. Realistically, I have to come to terms with the fact he may never be questioned or arrested over the threat to rape my son. That is terrifying, not just for me and my family, but for anyone else who crosses his path.

⏩ Follow on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre.

Police And The Paedophile

Anthony McIntyre thinks more needs to be done to protect a journalist under threat from East Belfast gangsters.
These threats are a despicable attempt to intimidate a journalist from doing her job and constitute an attack on freedom of the press ... We stand with Patricia Devlin and all journalists in Northern Ireland forced to work in a climate of fear - Patrick Corrigan, Amnesty International. 

Patricia Devlin is a beleaguered journalist who has not been getting the support she has a right to expect and her colleagues a duty to provide. She is constantly threatened by UDA thugs, a result of her reporting which has kept the spotlight firmly fixed on the fetid pondlife that relies on murkiness to survive and prosper. The intensity of the hostility directed her way was captured in one twelve hour period in which she received two death threats. At times the threats have been so specific that she has even been warned about the location where her would-be killers undertook to murder her.

I do my job to help others, to give people a voice - many of the people I speak to are too scared to speak out because they've been intimidated and attacked. I won't be giving up my job because it does make a difference and my worry is that Friday's threat was not only a threat to me but it was a threat to all media workers. The fact that these people are targeting journalists who are giving a voice to these people who are being intimidated, it's scary because if we don't have journalists to do that, who do we have? Unfortunately it's escalated and now we're seeing my name on walls in east Belfast with a picture of a crosshair. It's almost like we're going back in time, that we're not in a society that's going forward.

 

Amazingly, the spelling is right. 
Her family is so concerned at her treatment that it expresses a desire for her to be out of journalism altogether. "They don't want to lose me - I don't want to lose my life."

Sinister stuff which, if not curbed, invites the danger of complacency whereby threats to the lives of journalists are read routinely as part of the job description, which in turn amplifies the risk. 

Devlin is an investigative journalist with the Sunday World. The paper has already lost a journalist to loyalist killers, Martin O’Hagan. He was gunned down because of his coverage of loyalist activity and there are serious concerns that there was no proper investigation into his death because those that killed him were reputed to be police informers.   

Last year Patricia Devlin made an official complaint against the PSNI for its failure to investigate threats to rape her baby. The chilling terminology of child rape is reminiscent of television dramas about Mexican drug cartels. How it fails to prompt any serious interest on the part of the PSNI might be best explained by a need to protect agents within the UDA. Echoes of Martin O'Hagan's perilous odyssey. A baby is threatened with rape and the police response is evening all, hello, hello, hello. 

Devlin feels seriously let down by the PSNI which seems more focused on hounding other victims of the organisation threatening her.  Slow to respond to a rape threat to a child the cops are quick out of the traps to abuse and arrest the survivor of a UDA massacre in the Lower Ormeau Road 29 years ago which took place with more than a hint of police collusion.  

Earlier this year Devlin was to be a keynote speaker at an online conference organised by the Compass Rose Network, the purpose of which was "to discuss attacks on women journalists." The event was effectively scuttled by some of Devlin's NUJ colleagues on grounds considered spurious by the organisers, one of whom, Lesley Stock, has since claimed that the decision to torpedo the conference effectively threw Patricia Devlin under the bus. Denied the protection afforded by the watchful eye of an international audience, Devlin has been left vulnerable, her UDA predators sensing blood and circling their prey with what Devlin has called impunity.

Patricia Devlin's sense of isolation and abandonment reached a new height during the week when she pointed out that a new body, Women In Media, had completely ignored her plight. 


Hi @WIMBelfast last week, my name was spray painted on 3 walls with gun crosshairs. I have received six threats from paramilitaries including one to my newborn son in just over a year. I haven’t heard from you. Do u represent all women in the media under threat here?

The response she received was as condescending as it was blindingly stupid. 

Sorry to hear that, Patricia. We empathise fully as all three of our founders have experienced death threats and multiple threats of violence. We hope your employers, the NUJ and the PSNI are providing the support you deserve. 

Which drew the bitingly caustic slap down from one online observer: 

Thank you for your application , unfortunately on this occasion you have been unsuccessful, we wish you every success in the future. Please feel free to apply again.

 

And another:


Hope someone else is helping you, because we aren’t.

A determined and courageous journalist is under threat. She has been told she would be killed, her baby raped. It is nothing sort of horrendous. With the Police of Piffle and The Sisters Of Silence paralyzed by a mixture of vanity and vindictiveness, the rest of us - bloggers, writers, artists of every conceivable hue - need to step into the breach and link arms with Patricia Devlin in total defiance of the murderous arms that have her in their crosshairs. 

⏩Follow on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre.

Crosshairs

Anthony McIntyre shares his thoughts on the British police arrest of two Northern journalists.

PSNI Stone Journalists For Turning Stones

London based writer Simon Pirani mourns the loss of a friend and journalist colleague who was killed in a bomb attack in Ukraine. 

Ukraine’s political life has been shaken by the car-bomb killing of Pavel Sheremet, the Belarussian journalist, in Kyiv on Wednesday – a brazen, brutal murder in broad daylight in the city centre.

Pavel Sheremet, Belarussian Journalist

The Broken Elbow calls for the release of an Ethiopian journalist, imprisoned for defending freedom of speech.

 As readers of the previous post on this blog will know, the world is full of journalists who are nothing more than overblown, overpaid stenographers.

Eskinder Nega

But then there are reporters like Eskinder Nega, an Ethiopian journalist and blogger, who took a stand for the principle of free speech – in his case criticising the corruption surrounding the election and rule of Ethiopian leader, Meles Zenawi – and in 2012 was sentenced to 18 years imprisonment on the basis of treason laws that essentially criminalize any and all criticism of the regime.

That was his second term in jail for airing concerns about the way the Zenawi regime did its business. His wife was also jailed and while in prison gave birth to the couple’s first and only child, a son. (The worst thing than can happen to most Western journalists, by contrast, is to have their weekly expenses claim challenged!)

Eskinder Nega’s case has become a cause celebre for Amnesty International and other human rights groups but while his plight has occasionally made it into the mainstream media, coverage has really been confined to what one could call the Nicholas Kristof circuit. (He really should have been a Ukrainian Nazi or a Syrian freedom fighter, aka a member of Al-Nusra!)

Part of the reason for this may lie in the fact that the Meles Zenawi regime has become a US ally in the war against Islamic terrorism, to the extent that even though the State Department slated its record on human rights, Ethiopia was exempted from the ban on military aid that normally applies in such cases.

In return Ethiopia invaded Somalia in 2007 and overthrew the pro-Islamic government. In an extraordinary move, the US allowed Ethiopia to complete a secret arms purchase from North Korea, even though this was in breach of UN sanctions imposed on the Pyongyang regime because of its nuclear weapons programme.

This little brief from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists tells you all you need to know about US-Ethiopian relations.

Against such forces the Eskinder Nega’s of this world stand very little chance. Which is why everyone should cry out for his freedom.

Here is a plea for his freedom made by his wife, Serkalem Fasil, made by Amnesty International:

Free Eskinder Nega!


Ed Moloney from the Broken Elbow with a piece calling for support for a fellow journalist currently languishing in an Ethiopian prison





During the more than a year that myself and Anthony McIntyre have been fighting the ill-advised attempts by the PSNI and the Obama Justice Department to confiscate the Belfast oral history archive at Boston College, we have been lucky to have secured the support of many good people from all walks of life who have been outraged and disturbed by this effort to censor and silence truth and history-telling.

 As a journalist, I have been particularly gratified at the support shown by fellow members of the media, many of whom have been generous with their time and advice. At times like this solidarity is really a great thing.

Now, it is my time to give a little bit back and ask people who read this column to give their support to a journalist whose fate makes our predicament seem like an afternoon picnic by a beautiful lakeside.

Free Eskinder Nega!

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