A CLOSE ADVISOR to Gerry Adams has been inadvertently tweeting from the Sinn Féin president’s account since he was taken into police custody last night.
Adams’s was arrested by the PSNI after he was asked to meet with them last night in connection with the investigation into the murder of widow and mother-of-1o Jean McConville in 1972.
Sinn Féin has confirmed that a close advisor to Adams, who accompanied him to Antrim last night, has been using the Louth TD’s iPad since he was arrested and has been inadvertently tweeting from the account, believing that they were tweeting from their own.
Adams is a prolific and infamous Twitter user whose personal and often bizarre tweets about his activities and his teddy bears have been cause for much debate since he joined the site last year.
But there was much confusion when his account last night tweeted the statement that had been issued following his detention by police in the North, leaving more than a few people wondering if he was tweeting from police custody.
That speculation intensified when this morning the account tweeted a piece written on IrishCentral.com by Niall O’Dowd heavily criticising the arrest of the Sinn Féin leader.
That tweet has subsequently been deleted.
Separately, we’ve also established that Sinn Féin deleted a tweet referring to the ‘arrest’ of Adams, because, party officials claim, they weren’t certain if he had been arrested or not and were of the understanding that he would be spoken to ‘under caution’.
Confusion arose last night when the PSNI said that a 65-year-old man had been ‘arrested’, while Sinn Féin made no mention of the words ‘arrest’ or ‘arrested’ in either statements from Adams nor his deputy Mary Lou McDonald.
The party also declined to say if he had been arrested when pressed last night.
McDonald subsequently acknowledged on Newstalk this morning that Adams had been arrested by the PSNI, saying: “In terms of the arrest element, he was arrested.”
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