nolympics writes

Colombia 3 Acquitted

Three Irish men arrested on leaving FARC territory in Colombia during august 2001 were acquitted of the most serious charge of providing training to FARC rebels yesterday in Bogotá. Niall Connolly, Martin McCauley and James Monaghan were convicted on the less serious charge of traveling on false identification. For this charge they were sentenced to between 26 and 44 months each, though it is not yet clear whether the three will be released immediately having served that much time already since their capture.

The arrests came just a month before September 11th and threw the Irish peace process into something of a tail spin as both the British and Irish media went into paroxysms over the alleged duplicity and conspiratorial scheming of the IRA. Indeed it seemed at the time as if the provos had wandered into an exceedingly well laid trap, one sprung by shadowy renegades of British and American intelligence bent on undermining the peace process and dealing a coup de grace to the credibility of Sinn Fein. Similarly such a tidy narco-terrorist conspiracy found many backers in the Colombian establishment who at the time favored a military rather than diplomatic solution to Colombia’s own peace process. Within hours of the arrests in 2001 a senior British diplomat had denounced the three as IRA members when in fact only one of the three had ever been confirmed as such.