Description
On 9 November 1997, the body of 22-year-old former RAF radar operator Raymond McCord was found dumped at Ballyduff quarry, Newtownabbey, just a few miles outside of Belfast. He had been killed with a concrete breeze block. His face had been so badly disfigured from the rain of blows that his coffin had to remain closed during his funeral.
The outlawed UVF, the oldest Protestant paramilitary group in Northern Ireland, had killed him on the jailhouse orders of Mark Haddock, the head of a drug-dealing unit in the north Belfast suburb of Mount Vernon. Haddock feared that Raymond McCord Jnr was about to reveal his activities to the leadership of the UVF.
The murder sparked an unstinting ten-year campaign by his father Raymond Snr to find his son’s murderers and attempt to bring them to justice.
Through a relentless campaign of death threats from the UVF, Raymond Snr’s quest for truth and justice was rewarded in January 2007, when the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland, Nuala O’Loan, published her report into his son’s murder. Codenamed Operation Ballast, Mrs O’Loan’s inquiry discovered that, at the time of the McCord murder, Mark Haddock was an RUC Special Branch informant who had been paid £80,000 from the public purse. Moreover, she discovered that Haddock had been directly involved in at least ten murders, several attempted murders, drug dealing, extortion and punishment beatings for which he was never brought to book.
This is the story of how one man, Raymond McCord, finally proved that the RUC Special Branch were colluding with loyalist paramilitaries in murders and other serious crimes.
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