Stevens Inquiries

The Stevens Inquiries were three official British government inquiries led by Sir John Stevens concerning collusion in Northern Ireland between loyalist paramilitaries and the state security forces. In 1990 Stevens declared that, based on the vast amount of information amassed, he could definitively say that collusion was "neither wide-spread nor institutionalised." By April 2003 he acknowledged that he had uncovered collusion at a level "way beyond" his 1990 view. Much of Stevens' evidence was obtained from advanced fingerprint techniques to link people to documents. By 2005 the team had identified 2,000 people from their prints with a further 1,015 sets of prints outstanding.