The son of a suspected “Stakeknife” victim said he is disappointed he found out through the media, rather than the UK government, that the alleged double agent changed his name again five years ago.
Freddie Scappaticci, believed to have been one of Britain’s top agents inside the IRA, with the code name Stakeknife, lived in England from 2003 under the alias Frank Conway and, according to a recent report in the Times in London, Frank Cowley from 2020. He died aged 77 in March 2023.
Paul Wilson, whose father was shot dead by the Provisional IRA in June 1987, said: “Frustration is the key word … With such public scrutiny on [Scappaticci], it is a special circumstance. We should have been given a heads-up that it was going to hit the media,” he said.
A British court ruled last week that Scappaticci’s will, estimated to contain an estate worth £500,000, should be sealed for 70 years. Aside from the wills of the royal family, this was the first time a British court prevented the contents of a person’s will becoming public.
The judge said there was a need to protect those named in the will from the “real risk of physical harm or even death because they might be thought to be guilty by association” with Scappaticci, he said.
The hearing to decide whether the will should be sealed was closed to the public and the media, while lawyers for the UK attorney general supported the will being sealed, the judge said.
Mr Wilson believes victims’ families are “entitled to know all this information”.
Mr Wilson was nine months old when his father, Thomas Emmanuel Wilson, was branded an informer, abducted from his home in Belfast and killed, seemingly on Scappaticci’s order. His family have always denied he was an informant.
Scappaticci was allegedly a leading member of the “nutting squad” of the IRA, which interrogated suspected informers during the Troubles between the 1980s and mid-1990s.
In 2003, the British media accused him of being the Stakeknife agent. Scappaticci always denied the claims.
He fled from west Belfast to England in 2003 and became known as Frank Conway. According to the Times in London, Scappaticci’s death certificate confirms he changed his name again to Frank Cowley in 2020.
Operation Kenova, the British police investigation established in 2016 to investigate Stakeknife’s activities, linked the agent to at least 14 murders and 15 abductions while working for the British army within the IRA. It concluded the agent, which it did not name as Scappaticci, killed more people than he had saved.
An individualised report prepared by Operation Kenova and delivered to the Wilson family last month allegedly showed police in Northern Ireland stopped investigating Thomas Emmanuel Wilson’s murder 5½ days after his death, said Mr Wilson. This is despite an RUC special branch informer naming “Suspect I”, believed to be Scappaticci, as being involved with the murder.
“The police knew who it was, but did nothing about it,” said Mr Wilson.
“There’s anger, disbelief, a whole range of emotions. All of this could have been sorted out in 1987,” he said.
“Every time you turn a corner in this, more questions get raised.”
Solicitor Kevin Winters said his firm acts for more than 30 plaintiffs in ongoing high court proceedings against the British state and Scappaticci.
He said his firm wrote to the cabinet office more than two years ago seeking “basic information” about Scappaticci’s death but was met with “silence”.
“It’s an absolute sickener for victims’ families to learn that not only did Scappaticci succeed in suppressing his identity but he also managed to amass a small fortune in ‘blood money’ from the [ministry of defence],” said Mr Winters.
“The recent major progress made with the release of many bespoke family Kenova reports has been undone in one fell swoop by cabinet office duplicity in keeping this information away from them,” Mr Winters said.
He said he is instructed to look at applying to Belfast’s high court to seek access to Scappaticci’s will. The existence of such a document “points to this man having assets and funds”.
“We shouldn’t forget that, as well as the State agencies, families are suing Freddie Scappaticci on the basis that he’s a mark for damages … That entitlement to continue the actions didn’t end with Stakeknife’s death,” he said.
Mr Wilson does not blame Operation Kenova for the lack of direct communication, but he believes a lot of the decisions concerning Stakeknife have been “made over their heads” by people scared to release information that could “open a can of worms”.
“We’re just collateral damage. It’s always our lives that are put on hold,” he said.
Operation Kenova was contacted for comment.
