Northern Ireland detectives failed to investigate a string of death threats against a Catholic lawyer who was killed by a booby-trap bomb eight years ago, the police-complaints watchdog in the British territory concluded Wednesday.Police Ombudsman Nuala O'Loan said police should have done much more to identify people threatening lawyer Rosemary Nelson, who defended Irish Republican Army suspects and pursued civil suits against the predominantly Protestant police force.
Nelson, 40, died March 15, 1999, after a bomb attached to the bottom of her BMW blew off both of her legs. She had been driving to collect one of her three children from school. Nobody has ever been charged with her murder.
The lawyer became a hate figure among Protestant extremists because she represented a Catholic protest group opposed to Protestant parades in the divided town of Portadown.
Confrontations over Portadown's annual march triggered rioting across Northern Ireland in the three years before her assassination.
Nelson testified to United Nations officials and other human rights activists that she had suffered 20 threats from 1996 to 1998, including two death threats from police officers.
O'Loan said her officers had concluded that the police failed to investigate two particularly threatening documents — one a 1998 leaflet distributed among Protestant extremists in Portadown that detailed Nelson's address and phone number, the other an anonymous letter sent to Nelson in June 1998 that warned, "We have you in our sights ... RIP (rest in peace)."
O'Loan said her office could find no evidence that Britain's Northern Ireland Office had forwarded a detailed dossier on those and other threats to the police.
She said the police should have made assessing the risks to Nelson, and trying to identify those threatening her, a much higher priority given the likelihood she would be targeted.
"They did not acknowledge the existence of the previous death threats, including two threats which were said to have come from police officers," O'Loan said.
"No individual officer had the responsibility for bringing together all these matters and making a risk and threat assessment based on all the available information. There were no systems in place at that time designed to ensure that information was captured and processed in that way," she said.
O'Loan — who also is Catholic and a lawyer — declined to publish her full report, but forwarded it to the Northern Ireland Office; to the Police Service of Northern Ireland, which is the more religiously balanced successor to the Royal Ulster Constabulary; and to a new commission investigating Nelson's death. That fact-finding probe, funded by Britain, is expected to meet in Belfast next month for the first time.
The police and Northern Ireland Office declined to comment.
A former Belfast mayor, Catholic lawyer and politician Alban Maginness, called O'Loan's findings "a significant step on the path to justice for the Nelson family" and underlined the importance of reforming the police.
Since Britain appointed O'Loan as Northern Ireland's first police ombudsman in 1999, she has published several scathing reports into past police practices.
She is stepping down in November and being replaced by Al Hutchinson, a former commander of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who has monitored the development of the Police Service of Northern Ireland since 2001.
The 10-year program of police reform began in 2000 under terms of the Good Friday peace accord of 1998, and seeks to make the force 30 percent Catholic by 2010.
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