UNMASKED | 

UVF brigadier led last week’s courthouse incursion as masked men sat yards from victims’ families

Senior loyalist wanted a show of support for accused as informer Haggarty gave shocking evidence

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A UVF brigadier was one of the masked men who took over the public gallery at Belfast Crown Court last week.

The Sunday World understands the terror group’s South East Antrim (SEA) brigadier led the Monday morning incursion.

The show of strength was intended as a display of support for alleged killer James Smyth, who was standing trial for the double murder of Catholic workmen Gary Convie and Eamon Fox in north Belfast in 1994.

Masked men sat yards from the victims’ families in a blatant act of intimidation.

The stunt backfired, with trial judge Mr Justice O’Hara ordering them to either remove their face coverings or leave.

According to sources, the UVF leadership is said to be “furious’’ at what they see as an own goal.

Members were keen to keep a low profile during the three-week trial which exposed the organisation as a sectarian killing machine riddled with police touts.

It’s not clear if the SEA brigadier – who cannot be named for legal reasons – acted off his own bat or had approval from HQ.

On the witness stand, killer supergrass Gary Haggarty blew open the UVF sectarian murder machine.

The supertout took aim at his terror pals and, one by one, took them down as he exposed the inner workings of the UVF’s sectarian mission.

With a “thank you very much’’ to Mr Justice O’Hara as he left the witness box on Wednesday, Haggarty turned his back on his career as a ruthless paramilitary and police tout.

They are the last words anyone in this city will hear him speak as he returns to his new life under a new name at a secret location in Britain.

His words of regret will ring hollow to the families of those he helped kill, in particular the loved ones of Convie and Fox, who listened to Haggarty detail how they planned their double murder.

In the process, he named and shamed the men he claimed have the blood of the innocent Catholic workmen on their hands.

Former UDR soldier Smyth (57) is standing trial for the double murder, which he denies.

Police agent Haggarty has characterised Smyth as a ruthless killer, implicating him in at least two other murders – that of taxi driver Gerard Brady and Sean McDermott, shot dead in his car in Antrim in 1994.

Haggarty joined the UVF in 1991 and within two years he was a Special Branch informant and second in command to Mark Haddock in the UVF’s notorious Mount Vernon unit.

Haddock had taken the reigns after his predecessor Hugh ‘Boot’ Hill was jailed for extortion.

He turned Mount Vernon into a sectarian murder machine. Haddock and Haggarty shared the same two RUC handlers but were allowed to oversee a killing spree.

In his evidence, Haggarty named the bewildering number of people involved in the Convie/Fox murders.

He said Roy Stewart was the UVF’s director of operations and oversaw the planning of the hit.

Haggarty told those gathered in Court 12 at the Laganside complex in Belfast that Stewart was involved at every level.

Stewart was with Tommy Sheppard in an Antrim pub when Sheppard was shot dead by Haddock.

The UVF said he was executed because he was an RUC informer – it was more likely that he was about to blow Haddock’s cover.

Stewart was alleged to have lured Sheppard to the bar. Haddock was accompanied on the hit by Darren Moore, another Special Branch agent.

Stewart was to later fall foul of the leadership when he stood himself down and defected to Billy Wright’s LVF in protest at the direction in which UVF Chief of Staff John ‘Bunter’ Graham was taking the organisation.

According to sources, Bunter responded by passing a death threat on to him.

Stewart was named as one of a number of suspects believed to have carried out the murder in 1997 of GAA official Sean Brown.

Mr Brown was abducted as he locked the gates at Bellaghy GFC’s grounds. He was bundled into the boot of a car and driven to a remote laneway close to Randalstown where he was shot six times.

Stewart now leads a quiet life in Antrim.

Billy ‘Buttons’ Montgomery was the getaway driver who lifted Smyth after he sprayed the workmen with gunfire from a Sten gun, it was claimed.

Buttons, according to Haggarty, was UVF commander in Rathcoole who routinely kept weapons for the terror group at his home.

He collected Smyth in a van he used to transport his hunting dogs, it was claimed. Montgomery, a heavy drinker, still lives in the sprawling estate but is a peripheral figure with no defined role in the organisation.

Mark ‘Gutsy’ Campbell, also named in court by Haggarty, was to have been back-up shooter on the job and is believed to have handled the murder weapon.

He accompanied Montgomery in the getaway van, it was claimed

Campbell moved to Islandmagee where he died of a drug overdose a number of years ago.

He also implicated Jim ‘Snapper’ Dodds, former second-in-command to battalion commander Rab Warnock.

Supergrass Haggarty detailed how the murder team met at the home of John ‘Marshy’ Marsden to discuss the operation.

Marsden, a former UDR soldier, was regarded as a maverick figure and sources have told us eyebrows were raised when he was included in the killer team.

According to the Haggarty evidence, he accompanied him when he test-fired the murder weapon at waste ground close to the railway line. It was from Marsden’s house that the attack was launched, it was claimed.

Haggarty told the court his house was “like a squat”.

He described how Marsden had drawn chalk outlines of bodies all over his house and put holes in the wall with numbers beside them to make it look like “a crime scene”.

Haggarty said it was like “the inside of a lunatic asylum”.

It was in here Haggarty said that, along with Smyth, Mark Haddock, Roy Stewart and the two men tasked with getting the killer away from the scene – Campbell and Montgomery – the plan to kill the workmen was discussed in its entirety.

Also at one of the meetings, said Haggarty, was Mount Vernon thugs Willie ‘Muscles’ Young and John ‘Bonzer’ Bond.

Another pair on the Special Branch payroll, they are believed to have been part of the team that carried out the brutal murder of Raymond McCord jnr in November 1997.

Bond was known as The Enforcer and, along with Haggarty, ordered and carried out a series of punishment shootings.

The Sunday World understands a number of their victims have taken legal action on the basis they were shot at the hands of agents working for the state.

“It is unbelievable how many people were involved in the Convie/Fox murders,” a UVF source told the Sunday World.

“Mount Vernon, Rathcoole, Monkstown – and make no mistake, this would not have been carried out without the approval of the Shankill.

“So from the top to the bottom and nearly all of them were working for Special Branch.”

When asked this week when he left the UVF, Haggarty said “the night before Operation Ballast was published”.

Ballast was the report published in 2007 by then-Police Ombudsman Baroness Nuala O’Loan.

Tasked with probing the investigation into the McCord murder, she exposed collusion between RUC Special Branch and almost the entire membership of the Mount Vernon unit.

It stopped the UVF dead in its tracks.

Justice O’Hara will hear a defence application that Smyth has no case to answer before delivering his verdict.