Irishman charged with 1982 Hyde Park bombing
DUBLIN: A 61-year-old Irishman was charged in Britain yesterday with the Irish Republican Army bombing of the queen’s ceremonial cavalry in Hyde Park in 1982, a strike at a top London tourist attraction that killed four soldiers and seven horses. The Crown Prosecution Service said John Downey was arrested Sunday at Gatwick Airport south of London and would be arraigned yesterday on four counts of murder and one count of causing an explosion. Downey would be the third man to face trial for the July 20, 1982, twin bomb attacks on ceremonial troops performing in London, one of the most audacious operations ever mounted by the Provisional IRA.
The first bomb in Hyde Park was planted in a parked car and detonated by remote control as the mounted troops trotted toward Buckingham Palace, a daily tourist event. Two hours later, a time bomb that had been hidden inside a bandstand in nearby Regent’s Park killed seven army musicians during a performance. Both bombs combined mining explosives and nails. Twenty-two people, including a policeman and three civilians, were wounded.
In 1987 a Northern Ireland man, Danny McNamee, was convicted of conspiring to cause both blasts and received a 25-year sentence based on fingerprint evidence collected from remnants of a bomb. But judges in 1998 quashed the conviction, noting that prosecutors had withheld forensic evidence of fingerprints implicating a senior IRA bomb-maker, Dessie Ellis.
Ellis today is a lawmaker in Ireland’s parliament in Dublin representing the Irish nationalist Sinn Fein party. He was extradited to Britain in 1990 to face charges of building both bombs, but he was acquitted on the grounds that he had already served eight years in prison for related charges in Ireland. Ellis had been convicted of possessing multiple power-timer units for IRA bombs, including those suspected of being used in the Hyde Park and Regent’s Park blasts.
The double bombing represented one of the IRA’s biggest killings of British troops, though much public attention focused instead on the fate of the horses. One died in the explosion and six badly maimed animals had to be shot at the scene. One horse that survived, Sefton, became a nationally popular symbol of British defiance to the IRA. The prime minister of the day, Margaret Thatcher, vowed that the twin bombings were “committed by evil, brutal men who know nothing of democracy. We shall not rest until they are brought to justice.” Prosecutors offered no explain why Downey, a native of County Donegal in northwest Ireland, was charged in connection with the Hyde Park bomb but not the Regent’s Park one. If convicted, Downey would face accelerated parole under terms of Northern Ireland’s Good Friday peace accord. That landmark 1998 pact paved the way for hundreds of Provisional IRA convicts to be freed from prison within two years.
The Provisional IRA killed nearly 1,800 people during a failed 1970-1997 campaign to force Northern Ireland out of the United Kingdom. The Provisionals officially disarmed and renounced violence in 2005, but IRA splinter groups still mount occasional bomb and gun attacks. —AP