Operation Kenova: PSNI Chief Constable Jon Boutcher warned it is not his role to press for Government apology for Scappaticci / Stakeknife

The interim findings of Operation Kenova last week – which took seven years and cost £40m – were that more lives were probably lost than saved by his actions.

PSNI Chief Constable Jon Boutcher, who headed up the Kenova investigation for most of its active life, publicly pressed Rishi Sunak to apologise last week.

Speaking in a press conference, he said: "The former Prime Minister Lord Cameron issued public apologies in the wake of the Bloody Sunday and Pat Finucan reports. In my view, the same thing should happen here."

However the TUV has challenged the Chief Constable on his intervention.

“It is not the job of any police officer to request apologies and the manner in which Kenova asks for them does nothing but serve the Republican agenda to rewrite history," a TUV spokesman told the News Letter.

"By asking for one from Republicanism and the Prime Minister Kenova plays into Sinn Fein/IRA’s hands and suggests there was an equivalence between terrorists and the state. That is not a game the Prime Minister should play.”

On Friday, DUP leader Sir Jeffrey Donaldson said the critical point of the Kenova report was that it highlighted how successfully the intelligence agencies had infiltrated the IRA.

Asked for his view on Mr Boucher's advice on an apology, he said the Government alone should decide how it would deal with the report.

“It’s a matter for the Government how they respond to Friday’s Operation Kenova Report," he told this paper today.

"The reason agents were needed in the first place was because there was a terrorist campaign being waged on our streets against the U.K. Government and anyone who worked for it including census workers.

“Whilst Sinn Fein want to quietly slip away from the hard realities of that report, it’s time they faced up to the facts. The Republican leadership must recognise that the Army Council not only terrorised unionists, but they brutalised, tortured and murdered their own community. Those people deserve an explicit apology. What was done would be war crimes in a warzone.

“Sinn Fein must acknowledge that this was wrong and apologise for these actions by Irish republicans. 60% of Troubles deaths lie at the door of republicans yet there is an unbalanced focus on the Government.”

He said intelligence agencies had infiltrated the PIRA leadership to such an extent that it was “almost inoperable”.

He was not alone in pressing Sinn Fein to go further than it went last week. Speaking in her position with Sinn Fein, First Minister Michelle O’Neill apologised to the families of alleged informers killed by the IRA.

But former Victims Commissioner Judith Thompson said that while Ms O’Neill’s apology to families was a move in the right direction, the party needed to be clear on what it was sorry for.

Sinn Fein leader Mary Lou McDonald also said she has a sense of “sorrow and regret” for everyone who was hurt and harmed during the conflict in Northern Ireland.However, Ms Thompson told the BBC NI Sunday Politics show that it was a move in the “right direction”.

“But for an apology to be meaningful … it needs to be specific, it needs to be given in a way which has actually been agreed with the families involved as being what they need to see,” she added.