THE incoming head of MI5 has been named in an official investigation into claims that the security service failed to prevent the murder of a policewoman.

The inquiry is focusing on the period in the 1990s when Jonathan Evans, who becomes director general of MI5 next month, was working for the service in Northern Ireland.

Nuala O’Loan, the police ombudsman for Northern Ireland, is questioning MI5 as part of a three-year investigation into the murder of Colleen McMurray, a police officer killed in 1992 by a mortar set off by a photographic flash.

Kevin Fulton, a former British agent in the IRA, claimed last weekend that he tipped off Evans — then his MI5 handler — that an attack was likely.

The row over Evans’s time in Northern Ireland will be one of the first challenges he faces in his new job. Fulton, who is planning to sue the Ministry of Defence for an army pension, has threatened to call on Evans to appear in court.

Fulton has also claimed that MI5 let the IRA buy bomb-making equipment and that Evans, whom he says he knew as Bob, helped him to organise a trip to New York in 1993 to buy infrared transmitters for use in IRA bombs. The idea was that MI5 would have the equipment sabotaged so that the bombs failed to explode.

It is understood that one of the reasons why O’Loan’s inquiry has taken so long is that she has not been able to obtain all the necessary information from MI5.

The security service has stated that Evans served in Northern Ireland in the late 1980s and 1990s and was moved out in 1999. Security sources strongly deny all Fulton’s allegations.

The story that Fulton travelled to New York has been confirmed to O’Loan by George Ivan Sterritt, a former Special Branch officer who died last month. He said an MI5 officer helped oversee Fulton but was unable to say who the officer was.

A Home Office spokesman said: “The security service will neither confirm nor deny these allegations.”

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