MP accuses police spy of bombing London department store in the eighties

The BBC is reporting that Green MP Caroline Lucas has used Parliamentary privilege to name a police informer, or agent provocateur, of planting a bomb that two Animal Liberation Front (ALF) members were jailed for in the 1980’s. She claimed that she believed there was strong evidence that under cover police office Bob Lambert infiltrated the animal liberation movement but overstepped investigating criminal acts into actually instigating and committing them.

The Green MP said one of the other men who was jailed claimed when he heard about the fire at Debenhams in Harrow “I straightaway knew that Bob had carried out his part of the plan. It seems that planning the third incendiary device was perhaps a move to bolster Lambert’s credibility.”

She said Mr Lambert “pretended to be a committed environmental and animal rights campaigner between 1984 and 1988… In October 2011, after he was exposed as an undercover officer, Bob Lambert admitted that, and I quote ‘In the 1980s I was deployed as an undercover Met special branch officer to identify and prosecute members of Animal Liberation Front who were then engaged in incendiary device and explosive device campaigns against targets in the vivisection, meat and fur trades’.”

She said: “Mr Lambert has also admitted that part of his mission was to identify and prosecute specific ALF activists. He says: ‘I succeeded in my task and that success included the arrest and imprisonment of Geoff Sheppard and Andrew Clarke’. Sheppard and Clarke were tried and found guilty, but the culprit who planted the incendiary device in the Harrow store was never caught.”

Ms Lucas said: “Bob Lambert’s exposure as an undercover police officer has prompted Geoff Sheppard to speak out about that Harrow attack. Sheppard alleges that Lambert was the one who planted the third device and was involved in the ALF’s co-ordinated campaign… [saying] “Obviously I was not there when he targeted that store because we all headed off in our separate directions but I was lying in bed that night, and the news came over on the (BBC) World Service that three Debenhams stores had had arson attacks on them and that included the Harrow store as well.

“So obviously I straightaway knew that Bob had carried out his part of the plan. There’s absolutely no doubt in my mind whatsoever that Bob Lambert placed the incendiary device at the Debenhams store in Harrow. I specifically remember him giving an explanation to me about how he had been able to place one of the devices in that store, but how he had not been able to place the second device.”

Lucas said: “This case raises anew questions about the rules governing undercover police infiltrators and informers, particularly when it comes to those officers committing a crime – an area where the law is particularly grey.”

In a further statementLucas stated that

“From the unmasking of Mark Kennedy and revelations about undercover officers’ affairs with unsuspecting women, to the shocking new allegations involving Bob Lambert, it’s now overwhelmingly clear that there is a scandalous absence of transparency and accountability in the murky underworld of undercover policing.

“In particular, the case of undercover police officer Bob Lambert and the alleged planting of an incendiary device raises deeply serious questions about the nature of undercover activity and the degree to which police officers act as agent provocateurs.

“Both Bob Lambert and Mark Kennedy are amongst those named in the legal action now being brought by eight women who say they were duped into forming long-term loving relationships with undercover policemen.

“If the forming of personal relationships in order to obtain information is indeed permitted and lawful under RIPA (the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000), then we need to ask ourselves if ruining the lives of women in this way – potentially breaching their human rights – is an acceptable method of gathering information.

“The rules governing undercover police infiltrator and informers are also remarkably deficient when it comes to giving false evidence in court to protect a secret identity.”