"Too big to fail' Why was Britain's man inside the IRA, 'Stakeknife', never prosecuted?

He was in very poor health and living a lonely existence, according to magistrate Emma Arbuthnot as she H sentenced Freddie Scappaticci, then 72, to a three-month suspended jail term.

- Daniel Boffey

It was 5 December 2018. Westminster magistrate's court had heard that Scappaticci, wearing a grubby blue fleece and green tracksuit bottoms, had used a laptop seized by police earlier in the year to search for information on "cars, the British Army, maps, combat, football and politics".

There had also been 13 searches for extreme pornography. Some of it included animals. It was this that had landed him in the dock.

Scappaticci had told police officers in mitigation that he was depressed, a condition from which he had suffered for a number of years. He wasn't really interested in animals that way. He preferred women.

It was "not doing anyone any real harm". The shabby, overweight figure left the court on London's Marylebone Road a free man. "You have not been before the court for 50 years and that's good character in my book," Arbuthnot told him.

It was a wounding comment then and, particularly, now for the relatives of the many victims of Scappaticci's past as one of the most notorious killers of the Troubles, who tortured and murdered informants in the IRA at the same time as being a British informant himself, indeed the "jewel in the crown" of the state's intelligence operation, according to one senior army officer.

The victims' families and, it is understood, the former Bedfordshire chief constable Jon Boutcher, who has been leading Operation Kenova, an investigation into Scappaticci and his relationship with the state, have long been frustrated by a failure of the prosecution service to act on referrals made on 2 October 2019 against the former IRA enforcer and those who worked with him.