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Police: IRA dissidents want US spy
( 2002-10-11 09:44 ) (7 )

Irish Republican Army dissidents are trying to find and kill an American agent billed as the key witness against their alleged former commander, Ireland's senior anti-terrorist detective testified Thursday.

Detective Chief Superintendent Martin Callinan, who commands the police's intelligence unit, said Real IRA members wanted double-agent David Rupert dead and were making "extreme efforts" to locate the former New York and Illinois trucker.

Rupert, who prosecutors say was recruited by the FBI and Britain's MI5 spy agency to infiltrate dissident IRA circles in the mid-1990s, is expected to be the star witness in the trial of alleged Real IRA founder Michael McKevitt. The long-awaited trial — the first ever in Ireland to feature a US spy — is due to start in February.

McKevitt, 51, has been held without bail for 18 months after being charged with directing the Real IRA, a breakaway group opposed to the 1997 cease-fire being observed by most IRA members.

The Real IRA claimed responsibility for the 1998 car-bomb attack in the Northern Irish town of Omagh that claimed 29 lives, the worst toll of any terrorist bombing in the past 33 years of conflict over the British territory.

This week's pretrial hearings — which began Tuesday in Dublin's three-judge, no-jury Special Criminal Court that hears all terror-linked trials in the Republic of Ireland — focused on defense attorneys' efforts to discredit Rupert as a reliable witness.

Rupert, who is with his wife in the US witness protection program, faced "a very real" risk of assassination if the Real IRA find him, Callinan said.

Rupert, whose last known US address was in Wheatfield, Ill., allegedly posed as a potential arms supplier in meetings with Real IRA chiefs and passed on details of his conversations. He also owned a pub in the mid-1990s in the border county of Leitrim, a power base for another shadowy dissident group, the Continuity IRA.

Prosecutors have already handed over to McKevitt's attorneys more than 2,300 pages of documents detailing Rupert's background and communications with agents from the FBI and MI5. The defense team is trying to paint Rupert as a veteran criminal who made exorbitant pay demands in exchange for being a spy.

In Wednesday's testimony, two FBI officials — Special Agent James Krupkowski of Chicago and Charles Fraham, section chief of the counterterrorism division in Washington — said certain documents still being sought by McKevitt's attorneys could place FBI agents and Rupert at risk.

One defense lawyer, James MacGuill, said in an affidavit that Rupert's trucking businesses in New York and Illinois had gone bankrupt and accused him of seeking spy work with the FBI purely for financial gain.

MacGuill cited a 1993 report by an unidentified New York state trooper who accused Rupert of overseeing smuggling operations on the US-Canadian border. The trooper's report, MacGuill said, described Rupert as someone who "will do anything if he sees a financial profit in it."

Krupkowski dismissed the trooper's account, noting that New York police didn't arrest him for the alleged smuggling. "If it was common knowledge about him, they did nothing about it," Krupkowski said.