The Northern Ireland “Troubles” were primarily a political conflict from the late 1960s to the late 1990s. The conflict also had ethnic and religious aspects.
A key issue was the status of Northern Ireland. Unionists/loyalists, who are mostly Protestants, generally want Northern Ireland to remain within the United Kingdom. Irish nationalists/republicans, who are mostly Catholics, generally want it to leave the United Kingdom and join Ireland, according to Wikipedia.
According to the British newspaper The Guardian, Amnesty International has called for an investigation into claims that British agents inside Ulster loyalist and republican terror groups were able to kill and target victims with impunity during the Northern Ireland “Troubles.”
Did the British secret agents have a license to kill?
Lady Nuala O’Loan, a former police ombudsman in Northern Ireland, claimed that some informers who were allowed to commit crimes (including murder) while being paid by the British state were “serial killers”.
On Thursday, the BBC1 program Panorama said that in many instances, the security forces – RUC special branch, military intelligence and MI5 – helped cover up killings carried out by their agents, writes The Guardian newspaper.
O’Loan said the U.K. agents were allowed to kill. “They were running informants and they were using them.
“Their argument was that by so doing they were saving lives, but hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people died because those people were not brought to justice and weren’t stopped in their tracks,” O’Loan said. “Many of them were killers and some of them were serial killers.”
OK, Fine. 