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N. Ireland Figure Is Charged With Murder


10:28 AM EST June 14, 2003
The Associated Press


BELFAST, Northern Ireland

A senior figure in Northern Ireland's major anti-Catholic paramilitary group was arraigned Saturday on a charge of murdering a colleague who led a splinter movement from the group.

The arrest and charging of William "Mo" Courtney marks the latest effort by authorities to suppress the Ulster Defense Association, an outlawed group that since its foundation in 1971 has been responsible for killing more than 300 Catholics - and, increasingly in crime-driven feuds, its own members.

In a related move, a new anti-racketeering unit this week received court permission to begin probing the bank accounts of top figures in organized crime, among them another UDA boss.

Courtney, 39, is charged in the slaying of Alan McCullough, leader of a splinter of the UDA. Locals told police they saw two UDA men walk away with McCullough, 21, from his family's home May 28 in the Shankill, a fiercely British Protestant district of west Belfast. His body was found in a shallow grave outside Belfast eight days later.

Detective Sgt. John McIntyre, who interrogated Courtney, told Belfast Magistrates Court that the militant had insisted when charged he was "definitely not guilty." Courtney did not speak during Saturday's brief hearing.

McIntyre said he believed police had sufficient evidence to connect Courtney to the slaying, though he conceded that Protestant witnesses failed to identify Courtney as one of the abductors in a lineup Friday night.

Police have already charged Iahab Shoukri, 29, with the murder of McCullough. Shoukri is the younger brother of the UDA's north Belfast commander.

The UDA, which proclaims itself the Protestants' last line of defense against the Irish Republican Army, has charted a self-destructive course ever since the 2000 parole from prison of its most notorious figure, Johnny "Mad Dog" Adair.

Adair resumed command of his Lower Shankill UDA unit and quickly became commander of the whole area, with Courtney one of his most visible deputies. Around the same time the UDA escalated attacks on Catholics in violation of its 1994 cease-fire and formally rejected the province's Good Friday peace accord of 1998.

But Adair clashed with the UDA's other five regional commanders, at times over his willingness to cut lucrative drug-dealing arrangements with other Protestant gangs in competition with the UDA's own.

Courtney had remained loyal to Adair even after other UDA chiefs expelled Adair last September. Courtney finally broke from his leader after Britain reimprisoned Adair in January in hopes of ending the bloodshed.

McCullough took over the leadership of Adair's remaining Lower Shankill supporters. They were blamed for killing a top UDA commander, John Gregg, on Feb. 1. The UDA responded by ordering Adair loyalists to renounce their leader or face death.

Dozens fled Belfast for Scotland, including McCullough, while Courtney assumed command of Adair's UDA patch.

Courtney, who served a prison sentence in the 1980s for the attempted murder of a Catholic, has long been a power-broker in the Glencairn neighborhood off the Shankill Road.

When the then-speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich, visited Belfast in 1995 to help build Habitat for Humanity houses for supposedly poor families in Glencairn, Courtney - who usually sports a tan courtesy of his several foreign vacations a year - was on hand to take receipt of the first house on offer.

 
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