NORTHERN IRELAND
RT
An inquiry into allegations of mistreatment – including sexual abuse – at a Belfast boys’ home has restarted amid claims MI5 agents knew about the alleged abuses but chose to use them to blackmail pedophile public figures.
The Historical Institutional Abuse (HIA) Inquiry reconvened on Tuesday to examine allegations dating as far back as the 1970s. It is alleged boys at the Kincora care home in Belfast were subject to vicious abuse.
The inquiry will hear from claimants who allege a VIP pedophile ring preyed on those who lived there.
In August 2014 former intelligence officer Captain Brian Gemmell claimed that his attempts to investigate at the time were cut short by his superiors.
He told the Independent that before he was told to leave the Kincora case alone in the mid-1970s “on the grounds that the service didn’t involve itself with homosexual matters, I had a meeting at a hotel on Buckingham Palace Road.”
He said three members of MI5 had spoken to him about “a known Protestant terrorist, John McKeague of the Red Hand Commandos, being homosexual, and they asked me if I thought he could be blackmailed over his homosexuality, because they had film of him.”
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