Newspaper watch: Donaldson killing - space aliens suspected

On Tuesday 4 April, the Minister for Justice revealed that Denis Donaldson's body had been found with one hand almost severed. The Irish Independent took this detail and turned it into a mutilation in their editorial of the next day.

"We don't yet know the full details of Denis Donaldson's killing only that he was shot in the head. But just as the Mafia put a canary in dead informers' mouths, the mutilation of Mr Donaldson was steeped in grisly symbolism."

Unfortunately for the Independent, their front page story in the same edition contradicted this, accurately informing the readers that the injury to his hand had been caused by a shotgun blast and that there were "no indications of torture".

On Thursday 6 April, the Irish Times front page headline declared "Republican members suspected of killing Donaldson". The story contained quotes from three named individuals: the senior investigating Garda, Bertie Ahern and Tony Blair. They all stated that they had no idea who had carried out the shooting. The headline referred to the evidence-free suspicions of anonymous "Garda sources in Donegal" and was unclear of what, if any, organisation the Republicans were members. The McBreartys must be relieved that they weren't the ones fingered.

On Friday 7 April, the Irish Times reported both the Taoiseach and "senior garda sources" declaring that there was "no intelligence as to the identity of the person who killed Denis Donaldson". Was the Taoiseach misleading the country or had their front page story of the previous day been nothing but baseless speculation? They didn't say.

Not to be outdone by the dailies, the Sunday Independent took up the challenge.

Eoin Harris attempted to use Occam's Razor as justification for an elaborate argument pinning the blame on the South Armagh IRA. Occam's Razor is a principle used to distinguish between competing scientific theories with equal explanatory power. It is most succinctly expressed as "the best theory is the one containing the fewest unproven assumptions". If one were to apply a razor to the unproven assumptions in Harris's speculative article, he would be left with a severely lacerated page.

Meanwhile, on the front page, Jim Cusack recounted a different, but no less elaborate, tale. This time the "Provos" hired a Continuity IRA gunman to kill Donaldson. Apart from asserting that this was what the Garda believed, Cusack failed to present a single piece of evidence for this unlikeliest example of cooperation between the Provos and the dissidents who bitterly oppose them.

Of course, just because a story is untroubled by evidence doesn't mean that it's necessarily wrong. However, Cusack's claim of special expertise on security matters was rather undermined by the rest of his article. It went on to expose a nefarious plan by Sinn Féin to set up "community safety partnerships... to try to ensure that Catholics in the North do not cooperate with the legitimate police groups". Partnerships are statutory bodies established by the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act and exist across the UK. They serve as liaison bodies between the state (including the police) and local communities. Local councils across Northern Ireland have been debating their introduction and their relationship to District Policing Partnerships for at least the last five years.