Posted by Javier on May 15, 19102 at 17:12:25:
¿Si no son terroristas, entonces qué son? Todos estos miserables terroristas se ayudan entre sí. Y ETA no se queda atrás tampoco.
DAILY TELEGRAPH DE LONDRES - Mayo 15 de 2002
(Primera página):
ADAMS ALLY'S TRADE IN TERROR
A senior IRA leader and key ally of Gerry Adams travelled to Colombia on a false passport to meet terrorists who were being trained by the Provisionals in return for drug money, The Telegraph has established.
Padraig Wilson, 44, was the leader of IRA prisoners in the Maze until he was freed early in 1999 under the Good Friday Agreement. He had served only a third of a 24-year sentence for possession of a car bomb and his secret trip broke the terms of his release licence.
The IRA is believed to have received hundreds of thousands of pounds from the Marxist group Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (the Farc) for help in developing terrorist techniques at least as far back as 1997, when the Provisionals declared a ceasefire.
A Telegraph investigation in Colombia and Washington also found that a Farc witness claimed to have seen James Monaghan, a convicted IRA explosives expert - named under parliamentary privilege as the group's "director of engineering" - unloading boxes of missiles from a private plane in 2000.
Senior Colombian army and police officers said the IRA had greatly helped the Farc's capabilities.
The Farc is threatening to bring the country to its knees. In recent months it has used gas cylinder mortars almost identical to those developed by the IRA with devastating effect.
On May 2, such a mortar killed 119 people, many of them children, at a church in Choco province.
Col Harold Lara, a police intelligence officer, said: "Since February we have lost 220 electrical towers, had 32 bridges blown up and had 30 police units attacked."
Colombian intelligence documents say that Wilson entered Bogota, the capital, on Air France flight 422 on April 5 last year and flew on by Satena Airlines to San Vicente del Caguan in Farc territory. There he was met by guerrilla leaders. He returned to Paris on April 16 by the same route.
A copy of an Irish passport bearing the name James Edward Walker and a photograph of Wilson has been passed to The Telegraph by Colombian intelligence.
Wilson was accompanied on the flights by Niall Connolly, Sinn Fein's representative in Cuba. Connolly, Monaghan and Martin McCauley were arrested on Aug 11 last year as they tried to leave Bogota for Paris.
They are alleged to be leading IRA members and are in jail awaiting trial on charges of training Farc terrorists.
The presence of such a high-ranking IRA man as Wilson in Colombia is powerful evidence that training activities were authorised by the terrorist group's top leadership.
A surveillance photograph of Wilson taken at San Vicente del Caguan airport was shown by the Colombian authorities at a House international relations committee hearing in Washington last month. Wilson, a former Sinn Fein worker, is a strong supporter and friend of Mr Adams, the president of Sinn Fein.
Another visitor to the Farc zone, entering on April 7 last year has been identified by British sources as a Dublin journalist and dedicated republican. He, like Wilson, travelled to San Vicente del Caguan via Bogota from Paris on a false passport. A Colombian document handed to the committee hearing identified him as "an IRA member".
All the IRA men travelling to the Farc zone from Bogota took internal flights with Satena, the national airline operated by the military.
Before Andres Pastrana, the Colombian president, abandoned the concept of the Farc zone in February, civilian passengers were greeted by armed Farc members.
The House committee produced a devastating report into the IRA's links with the Farc, although some of Sinn Fein's allies among Congress members tried to discredit its findings. British intelligence sources say that Brian Keenan, a member of the IRA's ruling army council with Mr Adams, also met leaders of the Farc, which has more than 18,000 members and controls much of the country's drug trade.
David Adams, a cousin of the Sinn Fein leader who was sentenced to 25 years in 1995 for conspiracy to murder and was also released early, is believed to have been among up to a dozen other IRA men who travelled to the Farc zone last year.
Emphasising that Wilson's trip was sanctioned by the IRA leadership, a senior British diplomatic source said: "You don't get much more senior than Wilson. This came right from the top."
By breaching his licence, Wilson is liable to be returned to jail to complete his sentence without having to be convicted of any offences. He is said to have acted as an emissary for the republican leadership.
"I think the message was, 'I bring greetings from the great leader,' " the source said. Asked who the leader was, he replied: "Adams."
There was no reply from Sinn Fein's press office in Belfast last night and a call to Rita O'Hare, its Washington representative, was not returned.
Mr Adams has said that neither he "nor anyone else in the Sinn Fein leadership were aware that the three men [Connolly, Monaghan and McCauley] were travelling to Colombia".
Washington, London and Bogota are convinced that the IRA's Colombian activities are also linked to Cuba, Venezuela and to Eta, the Basque terrorist group in Spain.
IRA leaders are believed to have used some of the payments to buy weapons in Latin America.
At the same time they were carrying out symbolic acts of arms decommissioning in return for the Army closing bases and demolishing watchtowers in Northern Ireland.
The money is thought to have reached the IRA through offshore accounts administered by the Farc. Some is likely to have been funnelled to Sinn Fein and some could have been used to buy arms from suppliers in eastern Europe.