This feels just like a punch in the stomach
Birmingham pub bomb victims’ families hit out at ruling that protects identity of IRA suspects
RELATIVES of victims of the Birmingham pub bombings said they had been ‘punched in the stomach’ yesterday after judges ruled suspects will not be named at reopened inquests.
Sir Peter Thornton, who will sit as coroner, went to the Court of Appeal to challenge a High Court decision to allow the ‘perpetrator issue’ to be considered at the inquests into the 21 victims.
yesterday, Julie Hambleton, whose 18-year-old sister Maxine died at the Tavern in the Town pub in 1974, said the latest twist in the saga left relatives feeling ‘rejected’.
Near a memorial to the victims in the grounds of Birmingham’s Anglican Cathedral, Miss Hambleton, 55, added: ‘Without the perpetrator issue being a part of the scope [of the inquest] how can you ever possibly finish the jigsaw? you have got a
‘Part of the jigsaw is missing’
major part of it missing. We feel as though we’ve been punched in the stomach again.
‘What we do, we do for 21 people who aren’t here to do it for themselves. They don’t have a voice, they don’t have a physical presence, but we do so we are their voice.’
She said the Justice4the21 campaign group would now ‘take stock, speak to our legal team and get their assessment of the decision’ before deciding whether to appeal.
Otherwise, she said, they would ‘just continue on with the inquest process’. Relatives had been forced to crowdfund in order to secure a High Court judicial review into the coroner’s original decision that the scope of the inquests should not examine who was responsible for the pub blasts in November 1974.
Sir Peter ruled in July last year that trying to identify the suspected bombers would be unlawful because the inquests could be seen as ‘taking on the role of a proxy trial’.
The coroner’s ruling came days before self-confessed IRA bomb maker Mick Hayes, 69, gave a BBC interview in which he accepted ‘collective responsibility’ for the double bombing, but claimed he did not know who planted the devices in the Tavern in the Town and Mulberry Bush pubs.
Lord Burnett, announcing the Court of Appeal’s decision yesterday said the coroner had made ‘no error of law’ and his original decision was ‘not open to legal objection’.
The original inquests were adjourned in 1975 in deference to the criminal trial against six Irishmen who were later convicted of the murders.
The following decade, a book and television documentary cast doubt on the convictions of the ‘Birmingham Six’, but the Court of Appeal dismissed an appeal in 1988.
Three years later, a granada Television drama-documentary about the bombings named four of the five alleged bombers.
In March 1991, the Six were released from prison after judges heard new evidence that police notes were tampered with – victims of perhaps the most notorious miscarriage of justice in British legal history.
But nobody else was charged over the murders and the inquests into the deaths were never resumed.
A decision to reopen the hearings was finally taken in 2016 by Louise Hunt, the senior coroner for Birmingham and Solihull in 2016, after an application by relatives of the victims.