There was to be no mercy. The three duty policemen were to be blown to pieces at their desks by a digger carrying a 400lb bomb and if any of them attempted to escape, they were to be shot dead.
Those were the orders from Jim ‘The Executioner’ Lynagh and Padraig McKearney, two of the more psychotic figures within the Irish Republican Army of the late 80s.
Sure enough, their bomb did go off and their mass attack on a tiny country police station in Loughgall did, indeed, lead to a bloodbath in the early evening of May 8, 1987.
However, the bodies strewn around the wreckage afterwards were not the corpses of the police officers earmarked for slaughter. They were those of eight terrorists – including the two maniacs in charge. The IRA certainly did not win that day. Indeed, they suffered their gravest defeat in the history of The Troubles, thanks to the men of the Special Air Service who had put themselves between the targets and the killers.
One of those SAS men – speaking for the first time, exclusively to the Daily Mail – recalls crawling out of the wreckage alive while still under fire. ‘It was like Rorke’s Drift with diggers,’ he says, likening it to the famous siege of a tiny British outpost by a Zulu army in 1879.
However, the SAS saved many more lives than the three policemen who survived that day. For forensic tests on the captured weapons showed that these had murdered more than 50 people and would unquestionably have been used to murder many more. Lynagh, alone, had been linked to more than 30 deaths. He had certainly not been planning his retirement from the killing game. Job done, you might say.
So why is this Labour Government now about to drag the SAS heroes of that day into a courtroom 38 years later? Why is it about to throw millions of pounds at a brazen attempt by ‘human rights’ lawyers and radical Irish nationalists to rewrite history? Why must taxpayers pay to repaint the IRA’s murderous incompetence as some sort of martyrdom while demonising the SAS as the bad guys?
Above all, why, in the week we remember those who have died for this country, has the Northern Ireland Secretary Hilary Benn again confirmed – as he did this week – that brave veterans who saved lives have fewer rights than the terrorists trying to snuff them out? For there is still only one set of combatants from The Troubles of Northern Ireland who can wave ‘comfort’ letters (secret get-out-of-jail cards, issued by the Blair government during the Northern Ireland peace talks to protect around 200 terror suspects from prosecution). And it is not our veterans.
Hence the disgust among veterans at Mr Benn’s announcement that the Government will resurrect plans for an inquest into the events at Loughgall. That flies in the face of recent assurances from Defence Minister Al Carns to this paper that no such inquest would take place.
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A scene of devastation outside Loughgall police station in 1987. It was the IRA’s gravest defeat in the history of The Troubles – thanks to the men of the Special Air Service
It is clear that the ineffectual Mr Carns and the Ministry of Defence, which purports to look after our veterans, either has no say in the matter or does not care. The Northern Ireland Office is calling the shots. What’s more, there will not just be one multi-million pound jackpot for the legally-aided juggernaut representing the ‘victims’. For Mr Benn has said that Loughgall will be followed by up to eight further ‘legacy’ inquests – shorthand for SAS victories over the IRA. We know how these will operate thanks to the recent inquests into the deaths of IRA terrorists (caught red-handed) at Coagh in 1991 and Clonoe in 1992.
In each case, Michael Humphreys, a High Court judge, has applied human rights law which did not exist at the time to an event more than 30 years before. He has then criticised both SAS operations because they did not ‘minimise to the greatest extent possible’ the need for ‘lethal force’. He has even referred the Clonoe case to prosecutors. In the cosy legal La-La Land of judges like Mr Humphreys, the only correct response on being confronted with a man in a balaclava blasting a machine gun in a public place is to say: ‘Halt. You are under arrest.’
So what happened at Loughgall? I ask John X, a long-serving SAS veteran in the thick of the action that evening, why British troops did not just ask those Provo hotheads to put their hands up. He emits an exasperated guffaw. ‘They’d already opened up first. If I’d tried to say, “You’re under arrest”, I’d be dead. And they wouldn’t have heard it anyway with all the noise going on!’
Now in his mid-70s, John has never breathed a word to anyone outside ‘the Regiment’ about the events of that evening. But Mr Benn’s decision to put him and his comrades up before a coroner’s court has goaded this brave old soldier beyond endurance.
As he points out, they all complied with a full investigation at the time and not a shred of evidence has surfaced since. The difference is that, back then, he and his mates received free beer in the mess for six months for ridding Northern Ireland of two homicidal monsters. Nor, back then, was there a Human Rights Act giving terrorists a ‘right to life’. This time around, those same gallant soldiers could end up being charged if the coroner decides the deaths were unlawful. It’s why the Mail’s ‘Stop The SAS Betrayal’ campaign is more important than ever.
From the outset, John tells me it was not ‘the Loughgall ambush’, as the IRA and their sympathisers label it. ‘They want to call it an “ambush” because it makes it sound like we set out to kill them,’ he says. ‘If that had been an ambush we’d have done it totally differently. It’s the same when they claim we had a “shoot to kill” policy. It’s rubbish. These were defensive operations to protect other people. And you have to remember, we were getting tip-offs like this all the time. Most of them would never come to anything.’
IRA arms captured after the Loughgall attack. Forensics tests on the weapons showed that these had murdered more than 50 people
All he knew was that the RUC had received intelligence that the IRA might be preparing an imminent attack on Loughgall police station and needed extra help from the SAS. The tip-off was in keeping with Jim Lynagh’s new Maoist strategy of ‘liberating’ areas by erasing government buildings and their occupants. A Sinn Fein councillor in Monagahan, Lynagh was living happily in the Republic of Ireland while enjoying occasional daytrips into the North for a spot of killing.
So John arrived at Loughgall to find a small station manned during daytime office hours by two or three officers. The plan was to plant five SAS men, including himself, inside the station in plain clothes overnight, hidden from view in an upstairs room. They would also place small ‘cut-off’ units in the surrounding woodland, to provide cover, to stop enemy reinforcements and to stop innocent civilians blundering into any firefight. All in all, there would be 24 SAS men on the ground.
‘So we just sat there all day and nothing happened, except in the morning a guy came in on some pretence about a vehicle incident,’ he recalls. ‘We hid behind the door. It later turned out he was one of theirs doing a recce to check who was in the station but he never saw us.’ Even so, he fully expected nothing to happen.
That afternoon, however, two hooded IRA gangsters hijacked a van in Dungannon. Nearby, four armed men appeared at the Mackle family’s farm and ordered their son to hand over their digger and fill it with diesel. They then loaded the bucket with 400lb of explosives – a mix of fertiliser and diesel with a high explosive booster – and drove off, leaving two gunmen to stop the Mackles from raising the alarm.
At around 7pm, the RUC officers spotted a digger drive past, followed by a van. ‘The digger had its bucket up which looked odd so the boys were already on standby,’ John recalls. Moments later the vehicles turned round and came back. The van screeched to a halt opposite the station. ‘Five guys in balaclavas immediately deployed from the van and opened fire on us,’ says John. ‘There was no chance of saying “hands up” and all the rest of it. It was heavy fire raking the whole station.’
The IRA were aiming at the ground floor right-hand end of the building where the police had their desks. Suddenly, to the IRA men’s surprise, John and his team were returning fire from the first floor to the left. ‘A number of us got hit by fragments of bullets disintegrating as they hit the steel window frames.’ One of his team – we will call him Barry – fell back, his face covered in blood. ‘I thought Barry was gone,’ says John. ‘Then he crawled back as the digger arrived.’
The Mail’s ‘Stop The SAS Betrayal’ Campaign is more important than ever
By now, the Mackles’ digger had crashed through the station’s entrance gates, with three terrorists aboard. They jumped off, lit the two fuses and ran.
The plan was that if a vehicle bomb appeared, three of the SAS should run for the back door and regroup outside. John and Barry stayed put firing at the gunmen and the van from which they appeared to be grabbing more weapons. ‘Then we were just blown back against the back wall,’ says John. ‘We just looked at each other and said, “Let’s go”.’ The digger bomb had obliterated one half of the building. ‘You couldn’t see or hear anything. We aimed for the staircase but it had gone and we just fell on to the floor below.’
Both men ran out of the wreckage towards the gunmen. ‘The idea is to get into them as quick as possible. Because, of course, they’re going to be disorientated as well. And they aren’t expecting anyone to come out of the front. They were wounded but still firing. But not for long.’ As the sound of helicopters filled the air, it was over. Eight terrorists were dead while three had escaped. Also killed was a passing civilian, Anthony Hughes, travelling in a car with his brother, Oliver, who had been wearing a similar boilersuit to the IRA. John later heard that they had failed to stop when challenged by one of the ‘cut-off’ units. Oliver was critically injured.
Though one RUC officer received severe head injuries from the digger bomb, all survived. John and Barry had minor shrapnel wounds. ‘I had lots of holes in my trousers from bits of brick but you just pull it out and stick a plaster on it,’ says John, who would also need serious surgery for a back injury which still hurts to this day.
He remembers being flown back to barracks for the mandatory debrief and being snubbed by the general commanding British Land Forces. ‘Someone finally told him who I was and he said: “Oh I thought you were a cleaner”.’
Then due process kicked in. Over four days, all the soldiers were interviewed by police and signed written statements. In 1988, the Director of Public Prosecutions decided there was no evidence to warrant a prosecution.
In 1991, the Hughes family received compensation and, in 2001, the families of the terrorists received legal aid to take a claim for unlawful killing to the European Court of Human Rights.
Seven European judges awarded them £10,000 each for technical flaws in the legal process but did not deem the killings unlawful. In 2011, the Historical Enquiries Team of the Police Service of Northern Ireland ruled the IRA had opened fire first so arrests would have been impossible.
Yet, for the IRA, Loughgall remains a humiliation that has to be recast as a moral win, hence all the songs and murals about the ‘Loughgall Martyrs’.
Their lawyers kept pushing every new interpretation of the Human Rights Act until, in 2015, a (Tory) Advocate General caved in to demands for a fresh inquest. This, in turn, was quashed by the Conservatives’ 2023 Legacy Act which was supposed to stop veterans being hounded.
Labour is now dismantling that Act and reopening the case but with one crucial difference. Mr Benn has unveiled a new ‘Legacy Framework’ which also gives the Irish government a say in these matters. It did not go unnoticed that while he has pledged vague ‘new protections for veterans’, the Irish deputy PM has assured Irish voters there will be ‘no new protections for veterans’. Little wonder the old soldiers smell betrayal.
On previous form, we can be reasonably sure of a few predictions. First, the new inquest will cost many millions. Second, the soldiers will have nothing to add to their signed statements from 1987. And third, the debate will boil down to this: could the SAS have stopped the attack before it started? To which the simple answer is yes. They could have stood outside with blue flashing lights and hi-vis jackets whereupon the IRA would have slipped away quietly without a shot fired.
They would then have come back another day when no one was looking. And no one, 38 years later, would be demanding an inquest into why those policemen were slaughtered at their desks.
Because, even if they did, their killers could simply stick up two fingers and wave a ‘comfort’ letter.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning…
