Court rejects appeal over secret IRA tapes

[April 16, 2013]  WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court has turned away an appeal that sought to keep interviews with former Irish Republican Army members from being turned over to police in Northern Ireland.

Monday's order from the high court leaves in place a lower court ruling that ordered Boston College to give the Justice Department portions of recorded interviews with convicted IRA car bomber Dolours Price. Federal officials want to forward the recordings to police investigating the IRA's 1972 killing of a Belfast woman.

Price, who died in January, and other former IRA members were interviewed between 2001 and 2006 as part of The Belfast Project -- a resource for journalists, scholars and historians studying the long conflict in Northern Ireland.

In October, Justice Stephen Breyer temporarily blocked the interviews from being turned over.

[Associated Press]

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