Lawyers acting for the BBC have written to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal over allegations that one of its journalists was subject to police surveillance. The Police Service of Northern Ireland is alleged to have spied on journalist Vincent Kearney during his work on a 2011 Spotlight documentary investigating the independence of the police watchdog in Northern Ireland. Kearney, currently the Northern Editor at RTE, said that journalists must be free to carry out their work without fear that the police may secretly attempt to identify their sources. He said that he was determined to find out what happened. The allegations emerged during a hearing by the IPT in February following a complaint from journalists, Trevor Birney and Barry McCaffrey, that they had been subject to unlawful surveillance by the PSNI after making a documentary exposing police failures to investigate the murder of six innocent people by a paramilitary group. Durham Police, working with the PSNI, raided the journalists’ homes and the film production company Fine Point Films as part of a “covert strategy” to identify the source of a leaked document.