A Boston College oral history project may have played a role in the arrest of Sinn Fein party leader Gerry Adams by police in Northern Ireland.

Adams was arrested Wednesday over his alleged involvement in the Irish Republican Army’s 1972 abduction, killing and secret burial of a Belfast widow.

Adams was implicated by two IRA veterans who gave taped interviews to researchers for a Boston College history project on the four-decade Northern Ireland conflict. Belfast police waged a two-year legal battle in the U.S. to get the tapes, though parts had already been published after the 2008 death of one of the people interviewed.