PSNI officers missed opportunities to identify and warn a man who dissident republicans had threatened to kill six months before they executed him.
James ‘Jim’ Donegan was shot numerous times by a lone gunman while he waited to collect his 13-year-old son from school.
Aged 43, the father-of-two was targeted as he sat in his car, a red Porsche Panamera, in Glen Road, Belfast at around 3.15pm on Tuesday, December 4, 2018.
A Police Ombudsman investigation has found has that the PSNI missed opportunities to identify and warn him of the threat to his life.
Released today, the report reveals that in June 2018 police received intelligence that dissident republicans were planning to shoot an unnamed man “they believed to be involved in the sale of illegal drugs”.
The intelligence identified the type of car driven by the man and stated that he regularly picked up his son from a school on the Glen Road, but provided no date for the anticipated attack.
Members of Mr Donegan’s family told Police Ombudsman investigators that if he had been made aware of the threat he would have changed his routine so as not to put his son at risk.
In her findings, Police Ombudsman Marie Anderson said a failure by police to link Mr Donegan to the threat and warn him about it had deprived him of the opportunity of taking preventative measures.
Although she said police had faced challenges in identifying Mr Donegan as the subject of the threat, she found that “additional research of the police computer system at an early stage would have been likely to have made such a link”.
“As that did not happen, no threat management process was put in place,” said Mrs Anderson.
“This meant that police failed to effectively fulfil their obligation to take preventative measures to protect someone whose life was at risk.”
She added: “Some additional enquiries at that early stage, in particular checking Mr Donegan’s profile, would have revealed that he had previously been the subject of a number of threats from dissident republicans and was likely to be the unnamed person referred to in the threat message."
When interviewed, the officer who made those enquiries said he had not been aware of Mr Donegan or the previous threats against him.
Mrs Anderson said that if that officer had not retired before the conclusion of her enquiries she would have “made performance and disciplinary recommendations respectively in relation to the failure to make all reasonable enquiries and for omitting to make appropriate records of the enquiries he had undertaken”.
Mr Donegan was the subject of intelligence about two other dissident republican threats in June 2018, the report confirms.
“Police dealt appropriately with both these threats, meeting Mr Donegan and providing him with security advice,” said Mrs Anderson.
“Regretfully, the threat which family members have stated would have been most likely to have resulted in him changing his routine – given that it mentioned his son and a school - was the one which police were unable to associate with him and therefore did not warn him about.”
In her report, Mrs Anderson welcomed the PSNI’s acceptance and implementation of her recommendation for additional training for intelligence officers to help prevent a recurrence of the incident.
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