Dozens of IRA and loyalist paramilitary veterans are facing arrest after the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) confirmed its decision to seek all the taped testimonies that form the core of the controversial Boston College Belfast Project.

The project, set up in 2001, is an archive of candidinterviews with those directlyinvolved in paramilitary violence between 1969 and 1994 in Northern Ireland.

Participants were promised that these interviews would be released only to historians, researchers and journalists once they were dead. But now the PSNI is going to the courts in the US in an attempt to obtain all the project’s tapes, including those in which ex-IRA and Ulster Volunteer Force members talk about their roles during the Troubles. The move could have serious consequences for political stability in Northern Ireland.

To date, the PSNI has successfully pursued the Boston tapes relating to only one crime from the Troubles: the IRA’s kidnapping, murder and secret burial of Jean McConville in 1972. This led last May to the arrest of the Sinn Féin president, Gerry Adams. He was questioned but not charged about claims from former republican comrades he gave the IRA an order to “disappear” the widow to avoid a public backlash over the decision to kill her because the Provisionals believed she was an informer.

However, in a court case in Belfast on Thursday, another participant in the Belfast Project, the ex-UVF veteran Winston “Winkie” Rea, it was revealed that the PSNI had moved to seize his testimony as well. Police have since announced that they are pursuing all of the Boston College’s archive. “Detectives in Serious Crimes Branch have initiated steps to obtain all the material as part of the Belfast Project,” said a spokesman. “This is in line with the PSNI’s statutory duty to investigate fully all matters of serious crime, including murder.”

Last week, Ed Moloney, journalist and former director of the Belfast Project, accused the PSNI and the Public Prosecution Service for Northern Ireland of seeking all the material to create the impression that they were not just interested in using the tapes to investigate republican crimes only. “The secret efforts to obtain interviews allegedly given to Boston College by Winston Rea are a pathetic attempt by the security authorities to demonstrate balance in their efforts to invade a confidential academic archive in the United States.

“Having previously expended all their energies on attempting to obtain IRA interviews and in the process drawing the ire of Irish-America, the PSNI and the PPS are now trying to show Americans that they are even-handed by pursuing a well-known loyalist figure.”.