``Good year for RUC'' says Newman - only 23 killed
Last Wednesday Kenneth Newman, head of the RUC, issued his annual
report of ``successes'' and ``achievements''. However, certain
admissions had to be made, the most important of which was the
fact that military attacks by the Irish Republican Army rose by
1000 to 8,500. Incidentally these figures don't take into account
the recent increases in state forces fatalities, and the decrease
in civilian deaths; evidence of an increasing militarisation of
the armed struggle and a reluctance of Republican Forces to get
drawn into disastrous feuding/sectarianism.
Belfast Sinn Féin counteracted Englishman Newman's Brit lies with
the following statement:
``The Nationalist population and young people drawn from it have
had to go through untold suffering so that Kenneth Newman could
make his inflated boast of RUC `successes'.
The bulk of these so-called ``successes'' have been based on the
repressive 7-day detention orders and not on people caught in the
act of committing political offences. Medical evidence and court
statistics show the relationship between RUC interrogation and
RUC torture and RUC successes, where 80 per cent of people
convicted during the last year for political offences have been
sentenced on `confessions' in the form of signed statements.
These statements alone have superceded real evidence (people
caught in possession of firearms or explosives, or in the act of
committing a felony).
The attempted suicides during interrogation, the admissions to
mental hospitals and the overwhelming documentation of the use of
torture must be stated alongside Newman's boast.''
Republican News 27 August 1977
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