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Provos believed responsible for $6M dock heist

February 16, 2011

By Staff Reporter

By Jack Holland

The IRA is believed to have carried out one of the biggest robberies in Irish history, a day after Sinn Fein made record gains in the general election, according to usually reliable sources in Ireland.

Reports said that a seven-man active service unit posing as drug squad officers stole almost $6 million worth of French and Belgium cigarettes on June 8 in Belfast’s dock land. They took over the quayside from late night to early morning, locking dock workers in a container while they lifted four 40-foot containers full of cigarettes onto four trucks. A crane driver was forced at gunpoint to lift the containers. Loading the containers on to the trucks took two hours. The trucks were later found abandoned. The BBC reported that one was recovered in Omagh, two in Drogheda, Co. Louth, and one in Dublin.

A security source in Belfast said that the RUC had not ruled out the involvement of criminal elements but that the scale of the operation pointed to the Provisional IRA. The largest criminal gang in the North has at most six members, said a reliable security source. Dissident republicans are also thought unlikely to have the capability for such a job. One estimate was that at the very least 30 people took part in the docks heist. Apart from the ASU members, the team would have included truck drivers, escorts, a back-up team, and men to unload the containers, spirit them away and store their contents. It is calculated that it would take six men one hour to unload a 40-foot cantainer of cigarettes if they are on pallets but three times longer if they have to "hand-ball" the contents, that is, pass the goods out by hand.

"It had to be a good team," commented a security source, "sanctioned and cleared at the top."

The audacious heist has reportedly angered the Irish government. The Irish taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, is said to have raised the matter at a meeting with Martin McGuinness, the Sinn Fein minister for education in the devolved government at Stormont. McGuinness is believed to have denied any knowledge of the robbery.

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A spokesman for Sinn Fein denied the matter had been discussed.

"All meetings are clearly focused on achieving a resolution of the difficulties caused by David Trimble’s threat to resign," he said, referring the first minister’s statement that he will resign on July 1 if the IRA has not begun to decommission its weapons.

However, sources suggest that the robbery may have influenced Ahern to increase his pressure on Sinn Fein in relation to decommissioning. Ahern has forcefully demanded that the IRA begin to fulfill its commitments to put arms verifiably beyond use as the deadline for the Trimble resignation approaches. The taoiseach warned last week that if there was no move on arms, the Belfast government would be suspended for six weeks and the suspension would be followed by a fall election producing "more polarization and intransigence."

"Quite frankly, I do not think it would be possible to bring the government back," he said.

IRA involvement in the June 8 robbery would be significant for several reasons. Such a large operation, coming when it did, would have to have had the approval of the Provisionals’ leadership body, the seven-member Army Council, which includes several leading members of Sinn Fein. It would also mark the first time in many years that the organization has succeeded in carrying out an operation on such a scale in the city. The last major operation, mounted on Feb. 12, 1996, was also a cigarette robbery, at a warehouse on Boucher’s Road. But on that occasion the entire eight-member active service unit was seized by the police. Two years earlier, the Belfast IRA’s attempt to murder RUC Superintendent Derek Martindale was also intercepted by the police, and four were arrested. This was an especially bad blow to the morale of the IRA in the city, as the elaborate operation had been planned for over four months, and caused the IRA GHQ to suspect the existence of a major informer in Belfast.

Sources believe that the Provisionals have reorganized their finance department. The IRA’s new finance director is a veteran Belfast republican, nicknamed "Spike", who is a cousin of Danny McCann, one of the three IRA activists shot dead in 1988 in Gibraltar by the SAS, the elite undercover unit of the British army. In the early, 1990s, "Spike" had been a high-ranking member of the Provisionals’ Northern Command but then was said to have fallen out of favor with the IRA leadership.

When asked about the robbery, an Irish government spokesman said he would not comment on an ongoing investigation.

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