The Irish News
Barry McCaffrey
If the police ombudsman was accused of a reluctance to grapple with the issue of collusion when examining the McGurk's Bar atrocity, his report on Loughinisland is also notable for the absence of another crucial piece of the picture: the role of Special Branch both before and after the massacre.
Al Hutchinson states that he studied all "available intelligence" connected to the killings but important intelligence-related aspects of the case are not mentioned in the report, raising questions over how deep his investigation went in this case and, again, drawing attention to possible conflicts within his own office.
One example is sightings of the killers' car in the south Down area in the weeks before the attack - clearly the domain of Special Branch, clearly a critical avenue for Mr Hutchinson to explore.
Yet there is no reference to this, the context of the sighting, whether or how the information about it was dis- seminated within police circles, and whether it provided leads for the investigation.
Also, more than 10 years ago police told the families that they had recovered a hair follicle on one of the killers' balaclavas.
The relatives were assured that detectives would be able to bring the killers to justice if just one bead of sweat was found from the balaclavas and boiler suits recovered.
But despite the hair follicle appearing to be one of the most important forensic lines of inquiry there is no mention of it anywhere in the ombudsman's findings.
The 56-page report - surprisingly only 26 pages of which are devoted to a five-year-long investigation - provides no clarity on the police ombudsman's relationship with Special Branch and the level of access he has achieved into it during this investigation: a pronounced contrast to the work of Nuala O'Loan on Omagh and the Mount Vernon UVF, which majored on the role of Special Branch in murders in which it was alleged that infor- mers were protected from prosecution.
Omagh and the Mount Vernon cases spanned the period of 1993-1998 and the police ombudsman found that Special Branch activities in that era protected killers.
Loughinisland occurred within the same timescale - June 1994 - yet still the role, or lack of role, of Special Branch remains unexplored anywhere in this investigation.
What is public knowledge, although unacknowledged in the Loughinisland report, is that:
- by 1994 Special Branch's 800 officers had heavily penetrated both loyalist and republican groups, including the UVF in east Belfast
- the Loughinisland attack was mounted by the east Belfast UVF
- in the Omagh and Mount Vernon cases and the murders of Pat Finucane and Rosemary Nelson, Special Branch withheld information from the CID murder investigations
The apparent removal of this dimension from the Hutchinson approach is understood to have caused a deep split within the police ombudsman's office - referred to recently by a Committee on the Administration of Justice (CAJ) report into the effectiveness of the organisation.
The Loughinisland investigation, in particular, has been known to be a source of anxiety internally.
It also ties in with broader developments in investigations into the past: the Rosemary Nelson Inquiry reported back four weeks ago and the word "collusion" was not mentioned, allowing Secretary of State Owen Paterson to say that it therefore had not happened.
There have also been protests from nationalists at the transfer of NIO personnel into senior positions within key agencies within the criminal justice system following the devolution of justice powers last year.
So where does all this leave the relatives of the six men who died in The Heights bar 17 years ago and who went to the police ombudsman's office back in 2006 as their last hope for answers?
One of the key issues they wanted addressed was: "The suspicion that collusion pervaded the circumstances of the attack ... and the subsequent police investigation".
Tomorrow a political row is likely to play out on what turned out to be the focus of the report: the actual investigation by CID and Mr Hutchinson's conclusions that it lacked leadership and commitment and failed to properly investigate all available lines of inquiry to bring the killers to justice.
But can anyone be satisfied with Mr Hutchinson's final verdict on the subject of collusion in Loughinisland and his certainty that it didn't happen in this case?
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