Inquest delivers findings 48 years after 10 Protestant workers were shot dead when their minibus was ambushed in County Armagh
The shooting dead of 10 Protestant workers at Kingsmill in Northern Ireland in 1976 was an “overtly sectarian attack by the IRA”, a coroner has ruled.
Nearly eight years after the inquest opened, Brian Sherrard delivered his findings in Belfast on Friday into the Troubles killings in County Armagh.
Continue reading...Sinn Féin members pay tribute to Dugdale, who was also involved in 1974 art heist and police station attack using hijacked helicopter
Rose Dugdale, who went from a background of wealth and privilege in England to become an IRA militant and bomb maker, has died in a Dublin nursing home aged 83.
Dugdale was presented as a 17-year-old to Queen Elizabeth as part of the 1958 summer debutante season. Years later, in 1974, Dugdale was given a nine-year prison sentence, in part for her role in the theft of 19 paintings from the home of a wealthy British politician.
Continue reading...Victims’ families say Jon Boutcher’s report into British spy proves state and IRA were ‘co-conspirators’ in murder
The police chief who led the inquiry into a murderous British spy in the IRA known as Stakeknife has condemned MI5 for stalling his investigation, as his report was hailed by victims’ families as proof that the British state and the IRA had been “co-conspirators” in murder.
Jon Boutcher criticised attempts “to undermine me and the investigation” and spoke of a delay strategy deployed by the secret services as he revealed that agent Stakeknife had probably killed more people than he saved in the service of the British state.
The army’s claim that Stakeknife saved “hundreds” of lives was “implausible”, “rooted in fables and fairy tales” and should have rung “alarm bells”. He said it was probable that the handling of Stakeknife “resulted in more lives being lost than saved”.
Stakeknife was involved in “very serious and wholly unjustifiable criminality, including murder”.
There were several cases of murder where the security forces had advance intelligence but did not intervene in order to protect sources.
Boutcher had “extremely fractious spells” with the secret services. He was forced to hold several meetings with MI5 to raise “concerns regarding access to information, its decision to classify as ‘top secret’ an accumulation of ‘secret’ documents, the fact that solicitors representing former security force personnel had been given greater and unorthodox access to MI5 materials and my concern that its strategy was one of delay”.
When Operation Kenova tried to submit evidence files in October 2019 to prosecutors on Scappaticci and members of the security services relating to cases of murder, abduction and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, that “MI5 informed us that the building’s security accreditation had expired and we therefore could not proceed”. The evidence was finally submitted in February 2020.
Continue reading...Irish state’s founding fathers killed and disappeared five times more people than Provisional IRA would do over 30 years
The Irish Republican Army’s executioners shot and secretly buried their victims in fields and bogs, leaving them to decay and enter the ranks of Ireland’s “disappeared”.
Some were British soldiers, others were suspected informers or turncoats. Uncertainty about their fate and the location of their remains added a cruel twist to a brutal conflict.
Continue reading...Fans seen singing the Cranberries’ hit in stadiums but some Irish republicans are unhappy at revival
Twenty years after a lethal IRA bomb inspired its stark, chilling lyrics, the Cranberries’ song Zombie has experienced an unlikely rebirth as a Rugby World Cup anthem.
Ireland fans have belted out its chorus in stadiums across France and hope to do so again on Saturday after a quarter-final tie against New Zealand at the Stade de France in Paris.
Continue reading...Document says man claimed he would attempt to harm monarch while she was visiting California
An FBI file relating to a visit to the US by the late Queen Elizabeth II has revealed a potential plot to assassinate her.
The document, available on the FBI’s online vault, outlines what appears to be intelligence provided to federal agents about a threat to the queen’s life in California 40 years ago.
Continue reading...Death of Freddie Scappaticci, who always denied he was mole, puts question mark over inquiry into his alleged crimes
The man said to be the British army’s most important agent inside the Provisional IRA has died, putting a question mark over the inquiry into his alleged crimes and the role played by security forces.
Freddie Scappaticci, a west Belfast former bricklayer who was alleged to have been a top mole known as Stakeknife, died and was buried last week, it emerged on Tuesday. He was in his 70s.
Continue reading...Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson was assassinated by IRA gunmen 100 years ago and then all but forgotten
On 22 June 1922 Sir Henry Wilson, an army field marshal turned MP, unveiled a plaque to railway employees who had died in the first world war before returning to his stately home in Belgravia, central London.
He was a distinctive figure – tall, in uniform, with a facial scar that had earned him a nickname as the “ugliest man in the British army”.
Continue reading...In the face of scorn and contempt from former IRA members, a small number of dissident groups remain committed to armed action. What do they think they can achieve?
In the early hours of 19 April 2019, Belfast-born Irish republican Anthony McIntyre was awakened by his wife, Carrie, in their home in Drogheda, just south of the border in Ireland. “It’s not true, it can’t be true,” she was saying. “Lyra has been shot dead.”
Drowsy, confused and not quite believing what he had just been told, McIntyre fell back asleep. He awoke the following morning thinking, “What did she tell me?” McIntyre looked online, and saw that it was true: their good friend, the 29-year-old journalist Lyra McKee, had been observing a riot in Derry the previous night when she was shot by a republican gunman.
Continue reading...Proposals to end prosecutions relating to Troubles before 1998 opposed by Irish government
All criminal prosecutions relating to the Troubles and future attempts to take civil actions would be blocked under UK government plans that have united Northern Ireland’s parties in opposition.
The proposals, which are also opposed by the Irish government, were announced by Brandon Lewis, the Northern Ireland secretary, who told MPs it was a “painful truth” that criminal investigations were unlikely to deliver successful outcomes.
Continue reading...Even by the violent standards of Northern Ireland’s Troubles, the events of August 1971 were particularly shocking
Even by the standards of Northern Ireland’s Troubles it was a tumultuous, violent couple of days.
The British army swept into nationalist neighbourhoods across the region on the morning of 9 August 1971 as part of Operation Demetrius, rounding up hundreds of suspects without trial in the hope of snuffing out the IRA’s campaign.
Continue reading...Mary Lou McDonald says she is sorry the late Duke of Edinburgh’s uncle was killed by IRA bomb in 1979
The Sinn Féin president, Mary Lou McDonald, has apologised for the IRA’s 1979 murder of Lord Mountbatten, the Duke of Edinburgh’s uncle.
Speaking after the funeral of Prince Philip, she told Times Radio she was sorry that Mountbatten, 79, had been killed when the fishing boat he was on was blown up by an IRA bomb.
Continue reading...Patrick Magee says he was in IRA team that visited town in 1977 to potentially target government figures
The IRA bomber who almost wiped out Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative cabinet in 1984 secretly scouted a Labour party conference in Brighton seven years earlier, he has disclosed.
Patrick Magee surveilled the Brighton conference centre in October 1977 when the IRA sought to hit back at the then Labour government for its policies in Northern Ireland.
Continue reading...Acts of state violence, and repeated official denials, drove some Northern Irish Catholics to armed resistance. But not everyone in west Belfast supported the IRA’s methods
When Johnston Brown, a 27-year-old detective with the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) – the overwhelmingly protestant police force of Northern Ireland – volunteered in late 1977 to serve at Andersonstown police barracks in Catholic west Belfast, he was given a few pieces of very clear advice. He should never stop at a red light in west Belfast if it was safe to drive on. He should assume that any pedestrians who wanted to cross the road may be part of a trap – members of the security forces had lost their lives this way. Nor should Brown ever indicate that he was turning into a police barracks. He should approach with the flow of the traffic and then swerve suddenly in through the gates, to reduce the risk of being shot, and to make it harder for anyone to make a note of his registration number. And if he were unfortunate enough to fall into the hands of gunmen, he must attempt to shoot his way out – never try to talk himself out of trouble.
“I remember clearly,” Brown wrote in 2005, “one older detective sergeant, a man in his late 40s, telling me sternly: ‘Here you have at most between five and eight minutes at the door of any house you may call at on an enquiry. You have that much time to conduct the enquiry and get the hell out of those areas, because five to eight minutes is all the time it takes for the Provos [the Provisional IRA] to get hold of a weapon and a volunteer who will be only too keen to kill you before you conduct your enquiry and leave.’”
Continue reading...Police appeal for information on Belfast shooting of Jean Smyth-Campbell
A senior detective investigating one of Britain’s most controversial spy scandals has appealed to both ex-IRA and retired soldiers to help him get the truth about the killing of a young woman in the Troubles.
Jon Boutcher is a former chief constable of Bedfordshire and the head of Operation Kenova, which is investigating the military intelligence agent known as Stakeknife who betrayed the IRA for three decades.
Continue reading...Men fled country while on bail after their arrest in 2001 and a highly-publicised trial
Three alleged IRA members accused of training Colombian rebels in bomb-making techniques have been granted amnesty nearly two decades after they were arrested, as part of the South American nation’s ongoing peace process.
Niall Connolly, James Monaghan and Martin McCauley, who became known as the Colombia Three, were arrested at Bogotá’s El Dorado airport in 2001. They were charged with travelling on false documents and teaching members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (or Farc) how to build improvised mortar bombs.
Continue reading...The reporter was a ‘ceasefire baby’ who grew up in Northern Ireland in the 90s. This is the essay she was working on at the time of her murder last year
They call my generation the “Ceasefire babies”, though I’ve always hated that name. I hated the mocking tone in which it was usually said, as if growing up in the 90s in Belfast was a stroll. There were still soldiers on the street when I was a kid. I remember them – in uniforms and maroon berets, at checkpoints, on pavements, crouching down on one knee, as if ducking out of sight of an enemy the surrounding civilians couldn’t see. I remember walking past one with my sister, then aged about 16, after she had picked me up from school. “Do they wear hats on their heads to stop them from getting cold?” I’d asked. “Yes,” she’d replied, smiling, and the pale-skinned recruit I’d gestured to had smiled as well. He looked barely older than her, perhaps 18. That was around the time I learned that the toy gun I used for games of cowboys and Indians could not be brought outside, in case a passing patrol saw it and mistook it for a real one. It didn’t matter that it was silver with an orange trumpet-top on the end of the barrel.
It had happened, my mother assured me, to a little boy, on the same street where I’d seen the teen soldier. I was never sure if this was urban legend, but the only time I took the gun outside, to the back yard – which was surrounded by a 10ft concrete wall – I’d had the arse smacked off me. The helicopters were out; what if they’d seen it with their cameras, my mother said, and thought it was real? The scenario seemed unlikely to me: that a helicopter, thousands of feet up in the air, would spot a kid playing with a toy and send a patrol to our house. But my mother wasn’t taking any chances.
Continue reading...Party challenged over IRA links as former leader quietly chosen to help form next government
Sinn Féin has included Gerry Adams on its negotiating team to form the next Irish government, fuelling renewed scrutiny over the party’s links with the IRA.
A party briefing note leaked on Friday named Adams as a negotiator, raising questions as to why he was not on the published list. The disclosure came as political opponents piled pressure on Sinn Féin to renounce the IRA in advance of talks to form a coalition government.
Continue reading...Mother of victim urges Netflix to be respectful and truthful as people still grieving today
The mother of a boy murdered by the IRA alongside Lord Louis Mountbatten has appealed to the makers of the The Crown to accurately depict the atrocity in the next season of the Netflix series.
Mary Hornsey said she hoped the drama would show sensitivity in portraying the events of 27 August 1979, when a bomb blew up Mountbatten’s fishing boat off Mullaghmore, a village in County Sligo on Ireland’s north-west coast.
Continue reading...Claims lodged in high court in Belfast on behalf of victims of bombings in Northern Ireland
A fresh attempt to sue Libya for supplying the IRA with the plastic explosive Semtex during the Troubles is being launched by victims and the bereaved in Northern Ireland.
Claims have been lodged with the high court in Belfast on Thursday on behalf of two men who are seeking compensation respectively for the 1993 Shankill Road bombing and a blast on the Falls Road, west Belfast, in 1988.
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