Man in court over PSNI officer’s murder
A 21-year-old man appeared in court today charged with withholding information about the murder of a policeman in the North.
The accused, who cannot be named for legal reasons, is charged with failing to provide police with facts related to the shooting of Constable Stephen Carroll, 48, in Craigavon earlier this month.
He was remanded in custody by Lisburn Magistrates to appear at Craigavon Crown Court on April 17. His defence lawyer made no application for bail.
Dressed in a blue jumper, the defendant sat silently and impassively through the 10-minute hearing.
A court order prevented any further details of the remand proceedings being published or the reason for his identity being withheld.
A 17-year-old youth and former Sinn Fein councillor Brendan McConville, 37, have already been charged with Con. Carroll’s murder.
McConville, from Glenholme Avenue, Lurgan, was remanded in custody yesterday, 24 hours after the teenager appeared in the dock.
Meanwhile, a top republican being questioned about the killing of two British soldiers in Antrim, two days before Con. Carroll’s murder, remained in custody today after being dramatically rearrested yesterday, less than an hour after a High Court Judge ruled his detention unlawful.
Colin Duffy, 41, from Lurgan, was one of six suspected dissident republicans whose lawyers challenged a court order granting detectives more time to question them.
Duffy and three others were being quizzed about the murders of Sappers Mark Quinsey, 23, of Birmingham, and Patrick Azimkar, 21, of London, outside Antrim’s Massereene Barracks, while the other two were being interrogated about Con. Carroll’s killing.
The six suspects, who had been held since March 14, applied for a judicial review of a judge’s decision to grant detectives a further seven days to question them.
Although UK anti-terror laws allow police to hold terror suspects for up to 28 days without charge, Northern Ireland Lord Chief Justice Brian Kerr yesterday quashed the extension on a legal technicality.
He said County Court judge Corinne Philpott, while making her deliberations on the extension application, had not taken into account whether the suspects’ original arrest had been lawful.
On that basis he upheld the defence team’s claim that her decision should be reversed.
But no sooner had Duffy been released in the wake of the judgment than he was taken back into custody to face fresh police questions.
The other five suspects were set free from their cells at a police interrogation centre in Antrim.
Duffy’s lawyers and family have protested bitterly about his re-arrest but police have stood by the decision.
The well-known republican was once cleared of the IRA murders of a soldier and two police officers who were gunned down in separate attacks in 1993 and 1997.
Meanwhile, a hard-line republican group opposed to the peace process today presented a number of people it claimed had been subjected to heavy-handed treatment by the police during raids in the Craigavon area linked to their investigations.
Spokesman for Republican Sinn Féin Richard Walsh also called for the immediate release of suspects still being questioned about the security forces murders.
“Obviously there was wide-scale repression in Lurgan and Craigavon areas over the course of the past couple of weeks,” he claimed.
“The RUC (the group insists on calling the PSNI by its former title) was clearly intimidatory and brutalised a number of people.”
He added: “We are demanding the release of everyone being held about these crimes immediately.”
