Sean Kelly 'can be deported from US'
The US Board of Immigration Appeals has ruled that Sean Kelly (known as Sean O'Cealleagh), convicted of aiding in the 1988 killings of two British soldiers in the North, can be deported.
The decision reverses a lower court decision allowing him to stay in America because his crime was ”purely political”.
The BIA found that while Sean O’Cealleagh’s crime took place in a “political milieu”, anger and revenge were the primary motives.
“We conclude that the respondent’s crime was not fabricated and that it cannot otherwise be considered a 'purely political offence',” the board has ruled.
The ruling sent O'Cealleagh’s case back to the lower immigration court for new hearings.
When reached at his home in Angeles the Los Angelese Orange County community of Westminster yesterday, O’Cealleagh, 37, said he had not learned of the decision and declined comment.
O’Cealleagh’s lawyer, Jim Byrne, said his client would be victorious in future court hearings.
“As we have said all along, he wasn’t guilty the first time of the offence,” said Byrne. “But regardless, the nature of this conviction was purely political.”
O’Cealleagh was arrested in February 2004 at Los Angeles International Airport when he returned from a visit to the North. He was released a few months later pending the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s appeal of the lower immigration court’s decision.
In the April 2004 decision, Immigration Judge Rose Peters ruled O’Cealleagh should not be returned to the North because his crime was “purely political”.
Peters also said British prosecutors did not conclusively prove O’Cealleagh was present when the soldiers were beaten and that British courts were inconsistent in the way they treated suspects.
The US government has argued O’Cealleagh, who was granted permanent residency in the US in 2001, should never have been allowed in because of his conviction.
O’Cealleagh spells his name in Irish but is identified as Sean Kelly in British legal documents.
O’Cealleagh was one of three men given life sentences in 1990 for their roles in the deaths of the two soldiers, who were beaten and shot after they were discovered in civilian clothes at a funeral for a murdered IRA member in the North.
Convicted of aiding and abetting in the murders, O’Cealleagh spent eight and a half years in prison before being freed in 1998 under the Good Friday peace accord, which offered parole to hundreds of paramilitary convicts. O’Cealleagh has repeatedly denied involvement in the killings.
He emigrated to the US in 1999. He married an American woman and has a young son.
