Thursday August 30, 2001 |

BELFAST, Northern Ireland - Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams denied yesterday that three suspected Irish Republican Army figures imprisoned in Colombia had anything to do with his party yet appealed at the same time for their release.

Allegations that the outlawed IRA has been cooperating with guerrillas in the South American nation have shaken Northern Ireland's already troubled peace process. The IRA was supposed to have renounced violence as part of a wider deal that got Sinn Fein installed into a joint Catholic-Protestant government for Northern Ireland that is threatening to unravel.

Adams, who had not previously commented on the arrest of the three IRA suspects on Aug. 11 in Colombia, appealed to the Irish government ''to secure their freedom as soon as possible.''

''I can say with certainty they were not there representing Sinn Fein. I would have had to authorize such a project, and I did not do so,'' Adams wrote in an article for the Irish Voice, a New York City weekly. Sinn Fein released excerpts ahead of the newspaper's expected publication late yesterday.

Last week, the trio were ordered held without bail for up to eight months while Colombian prosecutors prepare a case alleging they were training rebels in the use of explosives. They were arrested at the airport in Bogota, Colombia's capital.

Cuba has already identified one member of the trio, Dublin aid worker Niall Connolly, as Sinn Fein's representative for Latin America during his five-year residence in Havana. Sinn Fein denied this but has declined to criticize Cuba, which Adams still plans to visit next month.

The other two figures arrested have previous convictions for IRA activities.

James Monaghan, convicted in 1971 of possessing explosives and conspiring to cause explosions, has been identified by British and Irish police as the IRA's director of education responsible for designing new weaponry.

Martin McCauley was wounded during a police ambush at an IRA arms dump in 1982 and was later convicted of weapons possession.

The Colombian arrests heightened Protestant suspicions that the IRA remains willing to resume its bombing and shooting in Northern Ireland, a campaign halted in 1997 so that Sinn Fein could gain entry to wider peace talks. Those negotiations produced the landmark Good Friday pact of 1998 that envisioned Catholic-Protestant cooperation in government and gradual IRA disarmament.

''If Sinn Fein has no case to answer on Colombia, why is Gerry Adams calling for the release of the three prisoners?'' asked Michael McGimpsey, a minister in the fraying Northern Ireland government from the Ulster Unionists, the major Protestant party.

The IRA was ''caught red-handed in Colombia,'' he said.