REVEALED: the UVF plot to murder Martin McGuinness
EXCLUSIVE EXTRACTS FROM DEFINITIVE NEW BOOK ABOUT LOYALIST TERROR GROUP
By 1990, those teenagers who had joined the UVF in west Belfast in the wake of the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement were now being blooded into military teams.
One of those who had joined the UVF’s ‘B’ Company said he was ordered to carry out surveillance on Tom Hartley, a high-ranking member of Sinn Fein.
“Matthew” recalled the specifics of the reconnaissance mission. “I had to walk past his house 10 times in a morning. I hadn’t a gun. I was s ****** g myself. What the f *** was I meant to do if somebody came out? We were wee lads from the Shankill.”
Other UVF sources claim that the organisation was actively targeting Martin McGuinness at that time, too, one of the Provisional IRA’s most senior commanders.
They suggest that the UVF had put an elaborate plan into operation to target McGuinness as he drove out of Derry City along the Glenshane Pass, where his vehicle would be specifically attacked by small arms and explosives.
For whatever reason, the plan was never put into operation.
But one of McGuinness’ former associates, 37-year-old Roger Joseph Bradley, a recently-released Provisional IRA prisoner, was not so lucky.
UVF sources claim he was a key member of the Provisional IRA team responsible for the Claudy atrocity on July 31, 1972.
A few days after the Claudy attack, a farmhouse near Bradley’s home in Craigavole, Swatragh, a small village in Co Londonderry, was raided by the RUC and troops, who discovered 200lb of homemade explosives, two 100lbs primed bombs, detonators and other bomb-making materials, as well as a Thompson sub-machine-gun, a .45 pistol, 400 rounds of ammunition and a crossbow.
A car found at the scene, containing a combat jacket was one of two stolen from the Loop, Magherafelt. The other stolen car was one of three used in the Claudy bomb.
Bradley was later arrested along with two other men and charged with the attempted murder of soldiers in Kilrea. They were subsequently jailed by a special court sitting in Coleraine, along with another man, who was charged with causing an explosion.
UVF sources further claim that Bradley was specifically targeted when it became known that he had been released from prison after his lengthy sentence.
The UVF shot Bradley dead as he took a lunch break while working on house renovations for the Housing Executive in Rathcoole estate on April 4, 1990.
A day after Roger Bradley’s murder, the Provisionals newssheet, An Phoblacht, issued a statement claiming that the victim was “singled out because he was a Catholic by the two gunmen who shot him dead”.
Interestingly, the IRA’s roll of honour does not carry Bradley’s name, despite him serving a long sentence as a political prisoner.
Despite the Belfast UVF’s success in targeting republicans, the same, however, could not be said of its teams in other parts of Northern Ireland.
In Mid Ulster, Billy Wright, who had undergone a brief reli- gious conversion in prison in the early 1980s, had become a key member of the Mid Ulster UVF command staff.
His unit was busy planning a new offensive primarily aimed at Catholic civilians with no connection to physical force republicanism.
Loyalist gang planned gun and bomb attack on the Glenshane Pass