Father-of-four Andrew Kearney was murdered in 1998, two weeks after he had an altercation with a senior republican. Now his family say Sinn Féin is ensuring that the gunman evades justice. Southern correspondent Valerie Robinson reports
WEST Belfast woman has accused Sinn Féin of shielding the IRA man responsible for shooting her brother and leaving him to bleed to death in a lift.
Andrew Kearney (33) was murdered two weeks after he was involved in an altercation with a senior Ardoyne IRA figure in a pub on Falls Road in July 1998.
Father-of-four Mr Kearney, whose grandfather had been in the IRA, was dragged from a New Lodge flat and shot three times.
After smashing the phone, his attackers abandoned him in a lift they had disabled, forcing his girlfriend to run down 16 flights of stairs and phone for help in a second nearby block of flats. Mr Kearney was later pronounced dead in hospital.
The victim's sister, Eleanor King, claims Sinn Féin is protecting his killer - said to have held a command role in the IRA - and of ensuring that he still evades justice.
In an RTÉ One documentary on paramilitary so-called punishment attacks, called Above The Law and due to be aired tonight, Ms King says republicans arranged for the main suspect to flee to the US to lie low.
Ms King is calling on Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams to "use his power" to help her family.
"He has the power to go to the IRA and get them to admit Andrew's murder. I want people to know that Andrew didn't deserve what he got," she says.
Ms King says her brother was singled out after coming to the aid of a teenager targeted in a bar by the senior republican.
"One dig and your man was down. [The IRA man] lost face in front of all of his cohorts and from that day on Andrew had signed his death warrant," she says.
Ms King accuses republicans of attempting to downplay the murder by making it appear to be a 'punishment' attack.
"I think because of the peace process and all that was going on they knew they couldn't get away with just murdering him so they made it look like a kneecapping because it was acceptable and then to claim that the kneecapping went wrong," she says.
Ms King says that shortly after the shooting Mr Adams visited the home of her mother, Maureen, a lifelong republican and admirer of the political figure.
"The first thing he said was that he was extending an apology from the top of the republican movement," she says.
Ms King tells the programme that Mr Adams then asked her mother what the family wanted.
"She wanted [those involved] handed over to the police and for justice to take its course in the line of the courts," Ms King says.
Ms King says she believes that at that point Mr Adams told her mother that would not happen, that the killers "wouldn't be handed over but that [Sinn Féin] would deal with any discipline that was forthcoming".
"The commander was stood down and basically within a couple of weeks, I think just two weeks, he was sent overseas, he was sent over to America and he stayed there for a while," she says.
"To me it was a case of not being stood down but 'keep your head down, take yourself off, go on a holiday and when you come back this willl have all blown over'. And that was the intention at the time, but 16 years later it's still going."
Ms King, whose mother died a year after the murder, says that in 2008 she herself asked Mr Adams for help.
"So much time had passed.... There wasn't going to be a big fallout anymore if they went public and admitted Andrew's murder. So we felt that now was the time to go public and admit that the IRA was responsible for Andrew's murder," she says.
She claims the family were told by Mr Adams that Sinn Féin could not go public but that he was willing to order a new internal probe.
She accuses republicans of giving the family the "run-around".
"We knew it was a whitewash. We knew they weren't interested in bringing any sort of closure to the family at all," she says.
Sinn Féin MLA Alex Maskey, pictured left, who is shown in 1998 denying the party knew who was involved in the killing, refused to comment on Ms King's claims about Mr Adams, now a TD for Louth.
"I can't speak for Gerry Adams," he said.
Mr Maskey said no-one had ever "made a claim or a statement" in relation to the murder.
"If that was carried out by republicans in the way the Kearney family say then I would apologise as a republican for that happening to them because it shouldn't have happened, quite clearly," Mr Maskey said.
Above The Law, a Below The Radar TV production in association with the RTÉ Investigation Unit, will be broadcast on RTÉ One at 9.35pm tonight.