Former RUC officer to be sentenced in connection with sectarian murder of Robert Hamill

A Craigavon court has heard how two "entirely innocent" people were sentenced over a former police officer's cover up of phone-calls made to a suspect in a sectarian murder case.

Robert Cecil Atkinson, 71 and of Brownstone Road in Portadown, is charged with conspiring to pervert the court of justice in the investigation into a gang attack on Robert Hamill in Portadown in 1997.

Robert Hamill was brutally attacked by a loyalist mob after a night out.

An RUC vehicle with four officers inside was yards away, and this crew has previously been accused of failing to intervene.

The young catholic man, a father of three, succumbed to his injuries over a week later.

Retired RUC reservist Robert Cecil Atkinson was one of those in the police vehicle that night.

He pleaded guilty to conspiring to pervert the course of justice in April. This related to phone calls made to a young man who was at the crime scene, and would become a suspect.

Initially he told police he did not make any calls to the suspect.

Investigations then revealed that two calls were made - one hours after the attack, and one the next week on May 2nd.

He later said it was a couple who stayed with him that night, to check in on their niece who was a girlfriend of the suspect.

The second call was allegedly his wife who called the suspect on "matters relating to martial arts”.

Prosecuting KC Toby Hedworth told the court that the couple's relationship later broke down and it emerged that Atkinson had drawn the married couple into his coverup.

They were then charged themselves, and sentenced to six months each back in 2002 - he was jailed, while her sentence was suspended.

The prosecution admitted they can't say what was said in that phone call, but that the court is entitled to draw an inference.

Defence KC Barry Gibson told Craigavon Court Court that due to multiple strokes, TMIs and heart attacks, “he cannot recall” the contents of the call he made on 27 April 1997.

Judge Patrick Lynch KC “there is one person in this room who knows what was said and it’s not me or you and no one else seems to know.”

Mr Hedworth KC conceded that while the prosecution cannot say what was talked about “however one has to contextualise the call being made by an officer who was on duty at the time, who had been present at the time of the assault and was ringing a young man who was going to be a suspect in the assault and who was also present at the time.”

The judge further suggested to Mr Gibson that given the significance of the event and the fact that Atkinson “has been living with this for 27 years it seems very improbable that such an event will have been excised from his mind,” and said that the fact Atkinson was a serving officer at the time "really does exacerbate the gravity" of the situation.

Mr Hedworth KC reminded the court that the couple initially believed to have made the phone-call to the suspect were sentenced in 2002.

He said: "It doesn't lie in his mouth to say “I should get a more lenient sentence" because of a delay that i myself have in part caused"'.

Family of Mr Hamill gathered in court today.

Atkinson is set to be sentenced next week.

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