A branch of British army intelligence and some police officers in Northern Ireland actively helped a Protestant paramilitary group to murder Catholics in the late 1980s, a report by Britain's top police chief Thursday said.

The report by Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir John Stevens centred on the murder of high-profile Catholic lawyer Pat Finucane in 1989 by the Ulster Defence Association (UDA), Northern Ireland's main Protestant paramilitary group.

It also examined the killing of Protestant student Brian Adam Lambert, shot by Protestant paramilitaries in November 1987 after they apparently mistook him for being a Catholic.

"I have uncovered enough evidence to lead me to believe that the murders of Pat Finucane and Brian Adam Lambert could have been prevented," Stevens told a Belfast press conference.

"I conclude there was collusion in both murders and the circumstances surrounding them," Stevens said, adding that collusion ranged "from the wilful failure to keep records, the absence of accountablity, the witholding of intelligence and evidence, through to the extreme of agents being involved in murder." He added: "The unlawful involvement of agents in murder implies the security forces sanction killings." Stevens said the Northern Ireland police force's investigation into Finucane's murder should have resulted in the early detection and arrest of his killers.

His report made 21 recommendations in a bid to safeguard future intelligence operations, including a call for the police service of Northern Ireland to carry out a full review of all procedures for investigating terrorist offences.

The Stevens report, described as the biggest criminal inquiry in British history, also found that military intelligence in Northern Ireland actually prolonged the conflcit.

The report suggests one branch of military intelligence was out of control and its activities were disastrous.

Finucane was shot dead at his Belfast home in February 1989 by a gunman belonging to the UDA who was also working as a Special Branch police informant at the time.

The man who supplied one of the weapons tipped off British military intelligence that a killing was to be carried out, but nothing was done to prevent it. He was later charged with the murder, but gunned down by former associates who wanted him silenced.

Stevens' report, which followed a four-year inquiry, had been widely leaked ahead of its publication Thursday.

Finucane's son called it "an embodiment of broken promises and dishonoured commitments." "The policy in Northern Ireland was -- and may yet be -- to harness the killing potential of loyalist (Protestant) paramilitaries, to increase that potential through additional resources in the shape of weapons and information and to direct those resources against selected targets so that the government could be rid of its enemies," he said.

"Simple policy. Simple operation. Simply chilling," he added.

Finucane's widow Geraldine told BBC television there should be a full public judicial inquiry "where this is brought out into the open, where everybody can lay their ghosts to rest and then society can move forward." - Sapa-AFP