Families of victims dismayed at lack of accountability after death of ‘Stakeknife’
He was described as being in very poor health and living a lonely existence by magistrate Emma Arbuthnot as she sentenced Freddie Scappaticci, then 72, to a three-month suspended jail term.
Scappaticci had told police officers in mitigation that he was depressed, a condition with which he had suffered for a number of years. He wasn’t really interested in animals that way. He preferred women with big breasts. It was “not doing anyone any real harm”. Both the victims’ families and, it is understood, former Bedfordshire chief constable Jon Boutcher – who has been leading Operation Kenova, an investigation into Scappaticci and his relationship with the state – have long been severely frustrated by a failure of the prosecution service to act on referrals made to them on 2 October 2019 against the formerIt is understood that Boutcher, whose officers had discovered Scappaticci’s pornography at the start of their investigations after seizing his...
He had lived in south Cheshire, it can be revealed. He took holidays with his estranged wife, who had remained in Belfast, in the Canary Islands, and also spent some time residing on a gated street in London. He was able to move about as he was a wealthy man thanks to the proceeds of his treachery against the IRA and a tax scam that was popular among the organisation’s senior members.
“The cynical view before he died was that was never going to be any prosecution and now he is gone there is no doubt,” said Kevin Winters, a lawyer representing the families of the victims of the arrangement between Scappaticci and the British state. After being interned in the 1970s, when the British started locking up suspected IRA members without trial, he moved up the ranks, becoming first the head of the Belfast brigade, then number two and leader of the internal security unit charged with flushing out informers.
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