PSNI urged to come clean on serial-killing agent ‘King Rat’

A leading loyalist paramilitary has admitted the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) knew Billy Wright, the organisation’s leader in Mid Ulster and later the leader of the Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF), was a British state agent.

Laurence Maguire told BBC’s Spotlight programme he had been called to answer questions about Wright for a UVF inquiry in the 1990s.

Maguire said he had begun to have suspicions when Wright stopped him from killing three men who were subsequently executed by the IRA as informers.

The revelation comes after the British government asked the Supreme Court to support its efforts to keep its role in UVF murders a secret.

Parts of Laurence Maguire’s interview were first broadcast in 2019, but have become more relevant because of information which emerged at recently stalled inquests.

Maguire, who was jailed in 1994 for five murders, told Spotlight that Wright, known as ‘King Rat’ had asked him to track three men believed to be in the IRA.

He described following them weekly, and his plan to kill them in a rural park outside Dungannon.

But, he said, whenever he proposed the attack, Billy Wright “was putting it back”.

“I thought there was something strange about it, and when I look back now, it seems there was a lot of strange things about it,” Maguire said.

Shortly afterwards, in July 1992, the three men – Gregory Burns, Aidan Starrs and John Dignam – were abducted and killed by the IRA as informers.

Former IRA member Tommy McKearney, whose brother and uncle were killed by Wright’s gang, said Maguire’s story raised the question of whether Wright had been protecting the men because they were in reality working for the British.

If Wright “was an agent”, he asked, “was he acting on orders to prevent Laurence Maguire operating against them?”

Maguire said he had subsequently been questioned by the UVF as part of an investigation into “suspicions” about Wright.

“I think it came to light that he was definitely working for somebody else.

“I just call it the Crown,” he said.

An inquest into UVF murders in Mid Ulster heard earlier this year that another UVF leader who was a suspected British agent, Robin Jackson, refused to speak out against Wright.

Jackson, who has since died, was also named in court documents as being suspected of involvement in a number of attacks in Mid Ulster.

Bernie McKearney’s husband and parents were killed in attacks in 1992 carried out by Mid Ulster UVF, evidently acting in concert with the British sate.

Inquests into the deaths of Kevin and John McKearney, and Charles and Teresa Fox, stalled earlier this year when the British Direct Ruler took legal action to prevent some material from being released.

“I do get emotional at times and I hate it, because I try to be a strong person,” Bernie McKearney said.

“But it has been hard knowing that if Kevin had have got the protection that state agents got, he could be living today.”

Other former UVF figures have also accused Wright of being a British agent.

Former Police Ombudsman Baroness Nuala O’Loan said, “I think we know that Billy Wright was an informant.”

She is critical of the government’s legal action, describing it as “absolutely appalling”.

“There is no justification whatsoever for denying them information which may have been of some significance to national security 30 years ago or years ago, but which now cannot, in many cases, be of any significance whatsoever.”

In April it emerged Maguire would be prosecuted for conspiracy to murder and possession of firearms, following admissions he made to the BBC documentary in 2019.

Under new British legislation, all inquests, investigations and prosecutions relating to the conflict before 1998 were halted earlier this month, with the families being referred to a new body known as the Independent Commission for Reconciliation and Information Recovery (ICRIR).

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