Getting away with murder?
Paratrooper Lee Clegg acquitted
by Laura Friel
``A farrago of untruths,'' was how Judge Kerr summed up Lee Clegg's
testimony as he delivered his verdict at the retrial of the British
paratrooper at Belfast High Court last week. The Judge branded Clegg
a liar as he acquitted the soldier of murdering West Belfast teenager
Karen Reilly. Karen Reilly was fatally wounded when a paratroop
patrol opened fire on the stolen car in which she was travelling in
September 1990. A conviction of attempting to wound Martin Peake, the
driver of the vehicle who also died, was upheld. A third teenager was
also seriously injured in the incident but no charges were ever
brought against any of the British soldiers who shot her. In a
189-page judgement, Kerr dismissed Clegg's version of the shooting as
``untruthful and incapable of belief.'' The British soldier's claims of
where he was standing at the time of the shooting according to the
Judge were, ``a farrago of untruths born out of the desperate need to
distance himself as much as possible from Aindow.''
At Clegg's
original trial fellow paratrooper Chris Aindow was found guilty of
conspiracy to pervert the course of justice by faking an injury as a
justification for the killings. Aindow was sentenced to seven years
imprisonment for the attempted murder of Martin Peake but his case
has not attracted the same high ranking support as that of his
colleague. Independent witnesses saw members of the patrol
deliberately injuring Aindow to back up their false claim that the
stolen vehicle had struck a soldier before being fired upon. The
third victim of the shooting has denied that there was even a
roadblock. She claimed the patrol had been hiding in a ditch when the
firing first began. An RUC officer who had accompanied the patrol
that night originally made a statement backing the soldiers' version
but retracted his evidence when the independent witnesses exposed the
story as a tissue of lies. At his retrial Lee Clegg attempted to
resurrect the original lie. Kerr said Clegg had ``concocted the story''
that he had fired because he believed that Aindow had been struck by the
car. Clegg's claim that he knew nothing about fellow members of his
patrol deliberately inflicting an injury to Aindow's leg to cover up
their crime, was dismissed by the judge as ``a most remarkable
coincidence''. Acquitting Clegg of murder, Kerr said that although it
was ``very likely he did'', the judge could not be certain that Clegg
had fired the fatal round.
Upholding the second conviction for
attempting to wound Martin Peake, Kerr said he was ``fully convinced
that he fired after the car intending to hit and disable the driver''.
The shot was fired when there was no danger to himself or his patrol,
the judge said. For nationalists across the Six Counties, Clegg's
acquittal was only marginally worse than the euphoria of the British
media who had lobbied so hard for Clegg's release.
Spearheading the
campaign, the Daily Telegraph gloried in the moment of their triumph.
Lee Clegg was ``no less a victim of injustice, in his own way, than
the Maguires, the Guildford Four, the Birmingham Six and Judith
Ward.'' But the ``chattering classes'' had turned away from Clegg
because he was ``a soldier, worse a paratrooper and that put him
beyond the Pale''. Those opposing the campaign in support of Clegg
were dismissed as a ``loose alliance of left-wingers, nationalists and
liberals.'' In the dulcet tones of the Daily Telegraph's
correspondent, Clegg was not a liar merely ``handicapped by
shortcomings in his powers of expression.'' ``No English jury would
ever have been willing to convict him of any crime in the first
place,'' the Telegraph contends. Getting away with murder? No, surely
not!
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