Freddie Scappaticci[1] (12 January 1946[2] – April 2023) was an Irish IRA member named in the Kenova report as a British Intelligence mole with the codename Stakeknife.
[5] Scappaticci was fined for riotous assembly in 1970 after being caught up in the Troubles and, a year later, was interned without trial in Long Kesh at the age of 25 as part of Operation Demetrius.
[8] 18 killings as a result of ISU activities have been directly attributed to Scappaticci,[9] including the murders of two senior policemen[10] and a suspected informer named Joe Fenton.
[8] After the original allegations broke in 2003, Scappaticci, by now living in the Riverdale area of West Belfast, claimed that his involvement with the IRA had ended in 1990 due to his wife's illness.
[4] He is known to have lived in Cheshire and Manchester, where his brother had settled, and later moved to a gated community in London, where he appeared before and was discharged by Westminster Court for alleged sex offences.
[citation needed] Scappaticci's first involvement with British intelligence is alleged to have been in 1978, two years before the Force Research Unit (FRU) was formed in 1980.
[15][16] Ingram paints Scappaticci at this time as "the crown jewels", the best agent handled by the FRU, and the asset was said to have been paid £80,000 a year.
[22] Stakeknife has been accused of being a double agent who was involved in the IRA's torture and murder of suspected informers while in the employ of the FRU.
[5] It has been alleged that Stakeknife's intelligence handlers allowed up to 40 people to be killed by the IRA's Internal Security Unit to protect his cover.
[27] The UDA/UFF had decided to murder the republican sympathiser who unknowingly had been targeted by the Force Research Unit (FRU) to divert attention away from Scappaticci.
[29] Scappaticci, born in Belfast to Italian parents, denied the claims, and launched an unsuccessful legal action to force the British government, to publicly state that he was not their agent.
In 1993 Scappaticci approached the ITV programme The Cook Report and agreed to an interview on his activities in the IRA and the alleged role of Martin McGuinness in the organization.
The Provisional IRA reportedly assured Scappaticci of their belief in his denials and has issued public statements suggesting that the announcement of the former as a "tout" was a stunt by the British government to undermine Sinn Féin and republican movement in Northern Ireland.
On 5 December 2018, the Westminster Magistrates' Court sentenced Scappaticci to three months' imprisonment, suspended for one year, after he pleaded guilty to possessing "extreme pornographic images", including those which featured animals.
[38] On 29 October 2020, the Public Prosecution Service for Northern Ireland decided that there was insufficient evidence to put him on trial on charges of perjury.
[39] This meant that there was little chance of him appearing in a criminal trial during the final years of his life, despite a multimillion pound investigation into his role as a state agent inside the IRA.
"In addition to spying for the British army, he was also the ISU's [IRA's, Internal Security Unit] chief interrogator, in which role he is believed to have been involved in 17 murders."
A major police investigation would later conclude that the probability was that more lives were lost than saved as a result of the agent's Stakeknife.”[45] On 11 April 2023, it was announced that Scappaticci had died the previous week at age 77.
[47] Sinn Féin MP John Finucane said it was "disgraceful and unsurprising" that British security services had withheld information from the inquiry.
[47] He also said that "As the British government's shameful Legacy Act was enacted to close down families’ access to the civil and criminal courts, British intelligence services have delayed the release of information to families who have waited for the truth for decades," and "The discovery that MI5 did not disclose vital information to the Kenova Inquiry may now further delay the publication of the full report into the investigation.