Gerry Adams offers to answer questions about 1972 murder of Jean McConville

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/mar/24/gerry-adama-questions-murder-jean-mcconville

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Sinn Féin's president, Gerry Adams, has instructed his lawyer to ask police if they wish to question him about one of the most notorious murders of the Troubles – the kidnap, killing and secret burial of Jean McConville.

In a statement on Monday, Adams said he was aware that police might want to speak to him about the killing given that veteran republican Ivor Bell was charged at the weekend for aiding and abetting in the murder.

Sinn Féin's leader described the murder as "a terrible injustice" in which he had played no part.

"I can understand the McConville family's anger and hurt given what they have been through and given what some former republican anti-peace process activists have been saying," he said.

His former friend, the late IRA Belfast commander Brendan Hughes, has alleged that Adams gave the order to "disappear" the widowed mother of 10 as part of an operation to pinpoint informers in west Belfast in 1972.

Adams also strongly criticised the Boston College oral history project, claiming some of the individuals interviewed had gone to great lengths to attack the republican struggle and the peace process.

It was alleged in court on Saturday that the case against Bell centred on a tape recording he gave about the 1972 murder for the Belfast Project – an archive for Boston College of IRA and ex loyalist paramilitaries speaking candidly about what they did during the conflict.

Meanwhile, one of the Belfast Project researchers, the IRA prisoner-turned-writer Anthony McIntyre, told the Guardian that Bell had also denied even giving the interview to the Boston College archive.

Asked if he feared he would be questioned about his interviews with IRA personnel, McIntyre said: "I reaffirm my unalloyed determination not to assist the PSNI in any way. Ultimately they might talk to me if they manage to access me arrest me but I will not talk to them. No journalist, writer, researcher should ever co-operate with the police against their sources."

McConville's children have said they want Adams arrested and questioned over the murder of their mother, whose body was not discovered until 2003 on a beach in County Louth in the Irish Republic.

The murdered woman's eldest daughter, Helen, said: "I hope this goes all the way up to the top," she said, "All the way up to Gerry Adams. There are more people who need to be in this court to answer what happened to my mother."

The IRA accused McConville of passing information to the British army but her family always denied this, claiming she was singled out because she had tended to a wounded soldier outside her flat. An investigation by the Northern Ireland police ombudsman rejected the allegation that she was an informer.