A FORMER army intelligence officer’s claims that Martin McGuinness, Sinn Fein’s chief negotiator and a former Provisional IRA chief-of-staff, was a British agent were dismissed by his party yesterday.

The Sunday World, a tabloid newspaper based in Dublin, quoted a former member of the Army’s controversial Force Research Unit, running paramilitary agents in Northern Ireland, as saying: “McGuinness was working for MI6.”

A number of other Irish newspapers made the same allegation but did not name Mr McGuinness, referring instead to “a senior member of the Provisional IRA and Sinn Fein” and “a leading Sinn Fein member”.

All the newspaper allegations, however, were based on the transcript of an alleged conversation between an MI6 handler and an agent known as “J118”. The provenance of the transcript document was explained by only one newspaper, the Sunday Tribune, which said that the intelligence officer, who uses the pseudonym Martin Ingram, was “circulating” it.

The document records a brief conversation which, according to Mr Ingram, alludes to an imminent Provisional IRA attack, which took place on the Coshquin checkpoint on the Irish border between Londonderry and Donegal on October 24, 1990.

Five soldiers and Patsy Gillespie, a civilian who was forced to drive a van containing a bomb, died in the explosion. According to the reports, the MI6 agent encouraged his handler to “push this along as quickly as possible”.

Mr Ingram told the Sunday World: “It has been confirmed to me that J118 is Martin McGuinness. The most significant thing for me . . . is the fact that McGuinness’s handler is the driving force between the human bomb campaign.”

Mr McGuinness refused to comment on the reports yesterday, but a Sinn Fein spokesman dismissed them out of hand. “We have heard this all before,” he said. “It is rubbish. It is nonsense. Anybody with half a wit will treat it with the contempt it rightly deserves.”

Two years ago Mr Ingram claimed that Freddie Scapp- aticci, a Belfast republican, had been an army agent at the highest levels within the IRA who was codenamed Stakeknife. Mr Scappaticci denied the allegation before fleeing his home in the west of the city.

Last month Denis Donaldson, a senior Sinn Fein member and convicted IRA bomber, was murdered in Co Donegal after admitting last year that he had worked as a spy for British Intelligence and Special Branch for more than 20 years.

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