DUBLIN — Sinn Fein chief Gerry Adams, the warlord-turned-peacemaker of the Northern Ireland conflict, was being interrogated over the grisly slaying of a Belfast widow that has haunted his political career for decades.
Adams was arrested on suspicion of ordering the killing of Jean McConville, a mother of 10 in his Catholic west Belfast power base in 1972. That was the deadliest year in four decades of bloodshed, when the outlawed Irish Republican Army was committing killings daily — and Adams was already a commanding figure.
The IRA branded the 38-year-old woman a British spy but killed her secretly and told her children, who ranged in age from infants to teens, that she had abandoned them.
If Adams, 65, is charged with the murder of McConville — who disappeared without trace until her bullet-shattered skull was found near a Republic of Ireland beach in 2003 — it would be a profound surprise and deal a damaging shock to Northern Ireland’s precariously balanced peace.
Adams’ track record suggests he won’t be.
He was arrested and interrogated repeatedly in the wake of IRA bombings and shootings in the 1970s and 1980s, and even met British government leaders face to face as an IRA representative for failed cease-fire talks in 1972, followed by the IRA’s biggest car-bomb offensive on Belfast. Yet he insists he’s never held any position in the underground army and has been convicted of only one IRA offense, a failed escape when imprisoned without trial.
Adams gave every impression he intended to walk free again, giving TV interviews shortly before delivering himself to a Belfast police station Wednesday to begin an interrogation he has anticipated for months, if not years.
“I believe that the killing of Jean McConville and the secret burial of her body was wrong and a grievous injustice to her and her family,” Adams said. “Well publicized, malicious allegations have been made against me. I reject these. While I have never disassociated myself from the IRA and I never will, I am innocent of any part in the abduction, killing or burial of Mrs. McConville.”
The difference, this time, is that key potential witnesses against Adams have been speaking, on tape, from their graves.
Police investigating the long-unsolved killing of McConville have been making arrests based on tapes of interviews with IRA veterans that they obtained, after a two-year U.S. legal fight, from Boston College. Its Belfast Project involved the collection of audio interviews with 26 IRA veterans detailing their own and colleagues’ careers. They spoke on condition their words be kept secret until their deaths.
Detectives sought access to all of the tapes after one of the interviewees, Adams’ one-time IRA confidante Brendan Hughes, died in 2008. His Boston College interview became the subject of a 2010 book, “Voices From the Grave,” by project coordinator and IRA expert Ed Moloney.
Hughes said he led the IRA team that “arrested” McConville, but her fate was sealed following a policy argument between Adams and the man who succeeded him as the IRA’s Belfast commander, Ivor Bell.
He said Bell wanted McConville’s body to be put on public display to intimidate others who might consider helping the British, but Adams wanted her killing kept a mystery, and she was buried in an unmarked grave.
“There was only one man who gave the order for that woman to be executed,” Hughes said in the audio recording, which was broadcast on British and Irish television in 2010. “That man is now the head of Sinn Fein. I did not give the order to execute that woman. He did.”
Adams and Hughes were arrested together in July 1973, when the British army pounced on an IRA commanders’ meeting in West Belfast. Both were interned without trial, the British policy at the time; IRA members did not face criminal trials until 1976.
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