Nationalist politicians have reacted angrily to a Special Branch claim that human rights lawyer Rosemary Nelson had passed on information to the IRA before her murder.

In March 1999 solicitor Rosemary Nelson was killed after a Loyalist bomb exploded underneath her car as she left her home in Lurgan, Co. Armagh. Until her death the mother of three had been a prominent human rights lawyer representing Nationalists on the Garvaghy Road during the Orange Order's Drumcree dispute. Throughout her career Nelson had complained about a series of death threats made against her by serving policeman. Those threats were taken so seriously that they were investigated by then United Nations Special Rapporteur Param Cumaraswamy. Cumaraswamy found evidence that police were failing to protect threatened lawyers. In 1998, just months before her death, Nelson testified before a special hearing of the U.S. Congress investigating human rights abuses in Northern Ireland. She confirmed that death threats had been made against her and her three children. Last year Police Ombudsman Nuala O'Loan confirmed that police had failed to properly investigate death threats made against Nelson months before her murder. In 2004 retired Canadian judge Peter Cory reported that he had found enough evidence of security force collusion in Nelson's murder to warrant the establishment of a public inquiry. A similar inquiry was recommended into the murder of solicitor Pat Finucane, who was also found to have been murdered as a result of security force collusion with loyalist paramilitaries. On Monday the inquiry in to Nelson's murder heard evidence from an unnamed member of RUC Special Branch officer who claimed that Nelson had passed on confidential case information to the IRA during her work as a solicitor. He also claimed that the married mother-of-three had been having an affair with leading Republican Colin Duffy, who Nelson had represented on two occasions when he was charged with the murder of policemen. Previously the inquiry had been told that Nelson had rented a home to Duffy, which the Special Branch had secretly bugged. The Special Branch officer told the inquiry that he would not have considered Nelson a terrorist, as he believed a terrorist to be someone who engaged in bombing or violence. However, he described her as "certainly assisting terrorists in the area." He also claimed to have received intelligence that Nelson and Colin Duffy had been having an affair. However the Nelson family's lawyer Barra McGrory, whose own father Pat had also been targeted by Loyalists because of his work as a human rights lawyer, dismissed the allegations as "malicious." "There is no evidential basis for this belief which is apparently held on the strength of unnamed and unidentified sources, who for all we know could have been from the Loyalist community who were deliberately spreading these malicious rumors about Rosemary Nelson," he said. Sinn Fein assembly member John O'Dowd said that attempts by a "faceless British securocrat" to slander Nelson's memory were "outrageous." "The British state directly and through its pseudo-gangs planned and carried out the murder of Rosemary Nelson. It now seems to be that not satisfied with murdering Rosemary, but they are now trying to assassinate her character," O'Dowd said. "It is telling that the individual, who made these allegations without producing a shred of evidence, is cowardly hiding behind the cloak of anonymity and that says more about his lack of character than anything else." SDLP Assembly member Dolores Kelly described the allegations as "sickening."

"I am absolutely disgusted that these faceless securocrats are still trying to besmirch the name of a woman who worked tirelessly for the community," she said.

"I think it is one of the most shameful things I have ever heard."