FBI reveals plot to kill Queen Elizabeth II
LONDON: A newly released cache of FBI files has revealed a potential plot to assassinate Queen Elizabeth II during her 1983 visit to California.
The possible threat followed a phone call made by “a man who claimed that his daughter had been killed in Northern Ireland by a rubber bullet,” according to the document that also refers to a bar frequented by Irish Republican Army (IRA) sympathisers.
The Queen and her husband Prince Philip visited the west coast of the United States in February and March 1983, and the trip passed off without incident.
Four years earlier in 1979, IRA paramilitaries opposed to British rule in Northern Ireland killed Louis Mountbaten, the last colonial governor of India and an uncle of Philip, in a bomb atack.
The file states that the man claimed he was going to atempt to harm the Queen “by dropping some object off the Golden Gate Bridge onto the royal yacht Britannia when it sails underneath.”
Alternatively he “would atempt to kill Queen Elizabeth when she visited Yosemite National Park,” they added.
A separate file among the documents, dated 1989, pointed out that while the FBI was unaware of any specific threats against the Queen, “the possibility of threats against the British monarchy is ever present from the Irish Republican Army.”
The Queen, who died last September aged 96, has previously been reported to have been the target of other assassination plots.
In 1970, suspected IRA sympathisers unsuccessfully atempted to derail her train west of Sydney, while in 1981 the IRA tried to bomb her on a visit to Shetland, off the northeast coast of Scotland.
In the same year, a mentally disturbed teenager fired a single shot towards the Queen’s car during a visit to New Zealand.
Christopher Lewis fired a single shot as she toured the South Island city of Dunedin.
The botched atempt was covered up by police at the time and only came to light in 2018 when New Zealand’s Security Intelligence
Service (SIS) spy agency released documents following a media request.
Also in 1981, another teenager fired six blanks at her during the monarch’s Trooping the Colour birthday parade in central London.
The Queen quickly calmed her startled horse and carried on while the teenager told soldiers who disarmed him he had “wanted to be famous.”