A thirty year mystery.
Hope the truth about 9/11 comes sooner.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Northern_Ireland/Story/0,2763,1103594,00.html
Loyalist bombers 'helped by British'
Angelique Chrisafis, Ireland correspondent
Wednesday December 10, 2003
The Guardian
A report into the bloodiest day of the Irish Troubles is expected to
reveal today that British security forces helped loyalist
paramilitaries to bomb the Republic of Ireland.
Three perfectly timed car bombs killed 26 people and injured hundreds
more during rush-hour in Dublin on May 17 1974, in what was described
as "daylight hell". An hour later a stolen car exploded outside a
Protestant pub in the border town of Monaghan, killing seven people.
It was the biggest mass murder in the history of the Irish Republic.
No one claimed responsibility for the slaughter, and no one has stood
trial.
After years of pressure the Irish government finally gave in to calls
for a wide-ranging investigation into the attacks, which security
experts believed loyalist terrorists were incapable of carrying out
unaided. The retired supreme court judge, Henry Barron, who has spent
three years compiling his report, is expected today to draw
conclusions on how British intelligence worked alongside the Ulster
Volunteer Force to plan the blasts. At least three of the bombing
team, all now dead, have been identified as paid informers.
Mr Justice Barron is also expected to detail the botched investigation
by Irish police, who are said to have had the names of 20 suspects
within weeks of the attacks, but were frustrated by the Royal Ulster
Constabulary.
A source familiar with the investigation told the Guardian that the
report was expected to raise the question of collusion, suggesting
that loyalist paramilitaries did not then have the capacity to make
such sophisticated explosive mechanisms.
Proof that British security forces helped to plot the Dublin and
Monaghan bombs would be even more shocking than the outcome of the
ongoing Saville inquiry into the killings of 13 civilians in Derry by
paratroopers on Bloody Sunday in 1972. If Mr Justice Barron suggests
collusion, Britain would have to defend bombing another European
state. Relatives of the dead are likely to demand a full public
inquiry and perhaps take the UK to the European court of human rights.
The bombs came at a time of political turmoil in Northern Ireland.
Unionists had called a general strike against the power-sharing
Sunningdale agreement, and four years earlier two Irish government
ministers were forced to resign after they were suspected of trying to
channel weapons to Catholics in the north, then under attack from
loyalist mobs and the police. Many, particularly in Dublin, believe
the bombings were a warning shot from British intelligence for the
Irish government not to interfere in Northern Ireland.
Jane Winter, the director of British Irish Rights Watch, a human
rights monitoring group which made detailed submissions to the
investigation, said: "Forensic evidence suggested that the bombs in
Dublin were very much more sophisticated than any bombs loyalists had
used before or since. All went off within one and a half minutes of
each other - a technical achievement never matched before or since.
The implication is that they had outside help in making these bombs."
She said if collusion were found, there would be grave consequences
for Britain internationally. "Here we are gaily telling the world how
to run its own human rights affairs and holding ourselves up as an
example of a developed democracy which doesn't do wicked things. But
if Britain did collude with loyalists to bomb another country, that is
an act of war."
The 300-page report will be made public this afternoon after it goes
before the Irish parliament's committee on justice, equality, defence
and women's rights.
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