by Ken Wharton
Stone found himself reasonably close to both Gerry Adams and another leading Republican, Joe Austin, but he couldn’t see Martin McGuinness, his other main target. Martin Dillon writes of a conversation he had with him; Stone said, ‘I was going to do them, but I didn’t; I wanted to finish the job on McGuinness, and other top people who would be standing together at the graveside.’* As he edged his way into a position from which he could launch his attack, another known IRA man looked at him with a quizzical look on his face; Stone simply uttered the one Gaelic term that he knew: ‘Tiocfaidh ár lá’ (our day will come), which appeared to satisfy the man.
At that moment, the coffins, having been carried from the respective hearses, were laid down at the side of the freshly dug graves prior to burial. Just as the third coffin was being lowered, Stone seized his moment, hurling two of the grenades into the mass of mourners, close to where McGuinness had appeared, standing next to Adams and Morrison. A female mourner – Jeanette McCabe – was hit on the head, the heavy metal casing knocking her unconscious before it exploded, wounding a man in his side. Stone hadn’t yet used the Browning, because, standing some 50 yards away from the Republican trio – the weapon is only effective to about 40 yards – he knew that the fired rounds would ‘only kick up dirt’.
In his own words:
I moved towards the Republican Plot and took out two grenades with five-second fuses. I pulled the split pins and lobbed both grenades over the heads of mourners, straight at Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams, who were 50 metres away. I was proficient in the use of grenades, and I knew that I could land them on the target. They flew through the air and the fly-off levers came away, causing two short cracks. I had announced myself.**
The crowd of mourners dived for cover as more shots were fired and two more of Stone’s grenades exploded, scattering razor-sharp slivers of metal into human bodies and marble gravestones alike. As he ran low on ammunition and was down to his last grenade, Stone began to back away, hesitantly at first, keeping his eyes on the mass of people in front of him. He later revealed that he planned to run through the cemetery to the south and climb over a low wall onto the M1 motorway, where he expected a vehicle containing fellow UFF members to collect him. As the echoes of gunfire and explosions died down, the crowd realised that Stone was fleeing; perhaps it was now safe to pursue their tormentor. With cries of ‘Orange bastard’, they began to surge towards the stocky man in the Puffa-type jacket. Thomas McErlean, a 20-year-old man, and another local, John Murray, who was 26, got within a few feet, but Stone simply shot them, killing them both.
The killer continued to run, before sensing that another of his pursuers was close; he halted, shooting as he turned, hitting Caoimhin Mac Brádaigh, a Provisional from Stewartstown. Although the round only wounded him in the buttocks, it ricocheted from a bone before severing an artery; the PIRA man died from massive internal bleeding. Stone fired again, more in hope than expectation, but one of his handguns then developed a stoppage; with the other now out of ammunition, he threw the last grenade, but it flew only a few feet before exploding with all the ferocity of a soggy firework. Now defenceless, he desperately tried to reach the motorway, puffing and panting, presenting a pathetic sight to the livid crowd of chasers who were at his heels.
He reached the low wall, scrambling over it but his heart sank as he realised that his rescue vehicle was nowhere to be seen. At this point, a huge lorry came towards him; realising that this was his final hope, he forced the driver to stop, clambering up into the cab, but the driver had barely covered more than a few feet before his cab was surrounded by an angry mob who forced him to stop once more. Both men were dragged from the vehicle before being kicked and punched, although somehow the bewildered and bloodied driver managed to convince his attackers that he was not involved, and he was allowed to run off to safety. The mob continued to beat the killer, dislocating his thigh bone in the process. Stone’s Ruger was grabbed, as was the Hi-Power Browning, and secreted away by the mob, before finally being handed over to a local Provo. It would be used again in several fatal shootings, as we shall see in due course.
Belfast’s Milltown Cemetery comes under attack by UDA man Michael Stone during the funerals of three Provisional IRA members. (Bobby Ingram)
Mourners panicking at Milltown Cemetery, Belfast, after a gun and bomb attack by Michael Stone.
Stone was now in a bad way, having been beaten badly by a mob that was understandably outraged at his attack that had left three men dead or dying, and many injured. He recalls hearing several of his attackers discussing where he would be taken to be ‘nutted’. At this moment, an RUC vehicle raced to the scene – alerted by the crew of a police helicopter that had been monitoring the funeral. He was rescued, but his weapons were now on their way into the hands of the Provisionals.
During the attack sixty people were wounded by bullets, grenade shrapnel and fragments of marble and stone from gravestones; among those wounded was a pregnant mother of four, a 72-year-old grandmother and a 10-year-old boy. BBC News cameras showed several vehicles racing away at speed, past rows and rows of blurred gravestones. It is now known that these vehicles were rushing away senior Sinn Féin/PIRA personnel from the scene of the carnage. Within minutes, ambulances began arriving, quickly ferrying the injured to the nearest hospital, the RVH, just along the Falls Road which is about a mile from Milltown. Violent rioting broke out that evening in virtually every Nationalist area of Northern Ireland, with mobs hurling petrol bombs at vehicles from the Westlink Bridge over the M1, close to where Michael Stone had been rescued.
Stone was a member of the UDA/UFF, having carried out several sectarian killings in their name, but the Loyalist paramilitaries were quick to denounce him, fearing a PIRA backlash against themselves personally. The West Belfast Brigade commander Tommy Lyttle claimed that Stone was not acting under orders from him, and another senior Loyalist, Sammy Duddy, stated that the UDA had contacted PIRA to disown the cemetery killer.
Stone was found guilty of six murders, being sentenced to 638 years imprisonment; he served thirteen years before being released under the terms of the GFA. However, in November 2006, he tried to attack Martin McGuinness at Stormont; his licence was revoked. He was returned to gaol and sentenced to a further sixteen years. In 2013, he appealed against his sentence, but the Court of Appeal in Belfast ordered that he serve at least another eighteen years.
What motivated Michael Stone to carry out such a ruthless, foolhardy, certainly audacious, attack will never be fully known. He had already carried out two, possibly three, sectarian murders prior to the Milltown attack: Patrick Brady, a Catholic milkman, on 16 November 1984, and another Catholic, Kevin McPolin, on 8 November 1985. He also admitted to killing Dermot Hackett on 23 May 1987, but there is some doubt about the veracity of this claim, and he was possibly taking the ‘rap’ for a friend. By March 1988, he was, therefore, a ‘seasoned’ killer: a sectarian bigot of the worst type, certainly in the same league, although not so prolific, as ‘Top Gun’ McKeag. In his self-serving autobiography* Stone claims that seeing a blackened and shrivelled corpse following the PIRA ‘napalm’ attack on the La Mon restaurant on 17 February 1978 that killed twelve people was a major influence on him. He has always maintained that the sight of human charcoal was the crucial turning point of his life, leading to a hatred for the Provisional IRA in general and Martin McGuinness in particular. Brought up in the Loyalist Braniel area of Belfast, he had initially joined the UDA/UFF but left to join up with the Red Hand Commando for a time. He finally returned to the UFF fold in 1984, where he was tasked with the assassination of leading Republican Owen Carron. However, the RUC had an informant inside his UFF unit and they were able to foil the attack.
Was he a madman, was he a sectarian bigot, or was he indeed motivated to kill by the terrible sights that he claims he witnessed after the La Mon attack? His plan – quite apart from being cold-blooded as well as murderous – was foolhardy in the extreme. As any military man or woman
knows, in the planning of an attack there has to be a ‘plan B’ or a route of withdrawal in the event of failure. Stone did not fully think through his ‘plan B’ given that it was a fair distance from the Republican plot, through rows of graves, over ground made heavy by the winter thaw and the rain that seems to fall incessantly on the entire country of Northern Ireland. He omitted to take extra ammunition for his two pistols that, as posterity has recorded, he sorely needed to aid his escape. He was a stocky man, clearly unused to running, leaving himself open to capture by a crowd of younger, fitter – as well as angry – pursuers. The notion of a van collecting him from the nearby M1 motorway is also flawed, given that, as any British motorist knows, stopping on the hard shoulder of a motorway is forbidden unless in an emergency. Any vehicle stopping there would have immediately come to the notice of the routine police patrols in that part of Belfast; given the sensitive nature of the funeral, patrols would have been stepped up in any case.
If he wasn’t quite insane, he was at best reckless and foolhardy; it was a suicide mission in every interpretation of the word. However, the second in a chain of tragedies that was set in motion in Gibraltar, had one more twist: another shocking incident that would leave the world gasping in horror at the events that would unfold just seventy-two hours later in Andersonstown.
A prelude to that was the senseless murder of an innocent Protestant civilian, Gillian Johnston (21), at her parents’ farm at Legg, near Belleek in Co. Fermanagh. A PIRA murder gang had crossed the nearby border with the intention of killing an off-duty UDR soldier who lived in the area. This was part of the Provisionals’ long-term strategy of border genocide – their own version of ethnic cleansing, designed to both drive the Protestants from the area, while at the same time controlling a demilitarised zone in which neither the Army nor the RUC would enter.
On the evening of 18 March, just two days after the Milltown attack, Ms Johnston was sitting with her fiancé in his car outside her home following a night out. At least five PIRA gunmen hiding in the darkness of the farm opened fire with automatic weapons, riddling the car and the two people inside with more than thirty rounds. The attack was both deliberate and indiscriminate; it was a sectarian attack on two people believed to be Protestants. Ms Johnston was described by her employer as ‘... the kind of girl who was always smiling’. He went on to say: ‘I don’t think that I ever heard her say a bad word against anyone.’ She was hit twenty-seven times, dying instantly; her fiancé, Stanley Liggett, was badly wounded but survived. Alerted by the crescendo of gunfire, her distraught parents found their daughter lying motionless in the bullet-riddled vehicle. The killers were from the IRA’s Ballyshannon unit, thought to have also been the ASU responsible for the Poppy Day massacre in Enniskillen on 8 November the previous year.
The following day, the horror that had started in Winston Churchill Avenue in Gibraltar climaxed with the terrible – and televised – deaths of two soldiers. The two men – members of the Royal Corps of Signals – were abducted outside Milltown Cemetery and savagely tortured before being thrown over a fence into the rear of Casement Park, where they were shot dead as they lay in a bloodied daze.
The simple facts are that the two soldiers had driven from Headquarters Northern Ireland (HQNI) in Lisburn to North Howard Street Mill (NHSM) to carry out work in the radio transmitter (RT) room at the Army base in the former Falls Forge. The two men were Corporal Derek Wood (24), from Carshalton in Surrey, who had been in the country for some time, and Corporal David Howes (23), from Northampton, who had only been in the Province for a week. The distance from Thiepval Barracks at Lisburn to NHSM is 8.7 miles and should take no longer than fifteen to twenty minutes in light traffic. Having completed their task, they were briefed by a Royal Corps of Transport sergeant as to their personal security. This author interviewed the RCT man in 2014 and, while he declined to be named, told me this: ‘I reminded them of parsec [personal security] in relation to the funeral of an IRA man at Milltown later that morning and advised them to avoid anywhere around Milltown, Andytown and the Turf. I told them not to worry about how long it took to get back to “slipper city” as HQNI was known; just to get back there in one piece.’
The two men in civvie clothes then left the base in their undercover silver VW Passat, driving south-west towards Lisburn. However, the next time that they were sighted was on Glen Road, some 300 yards from Milltown Cemetery where the funeral of PIRA Volunteer Kevin Brady was taking place, some three days after he was shot dead by Michael Stone. The TV cameras were filming the funeral procession when suddenly the Passat drove almost head on into the mass of mourners. The driver realised that he had made a grave error, trying to execute a U-turn in a side street; he was unable to do this, instead opting to reverse away, but vehicles behind him blocked his path. As he attempted to escape, a black taxi drove across his path, trapping the car in a quickly growing sea of angry men and women. Sinn Féin officials had warned that the funeral might witness a Loyalist paramilitary attack, which had put everyone in a state of heightened tension.
There was initially total confusion before the mob converged on the car, completely surrounding it, trapping the men inside in what was to be a fifteen-minute nightmare journey to their own deaths. One of the two soldiers in the car – Corporal Wood – drew his service-issue Browning 9mm pistol, the sight of which caused the mob to hesitate, some of them backing away. He then attempted to climb out of the driver’s window, firing one shot, which caused the baying mob to back away once more. However, one of the mob had climbed onto the roof, attempting to smash his way in with a wheel brace. This gave the crowd fresh courage and they swarmed all over the car, forcing the two soldiers out onto the road, before they were kicked and beaten; Wood dropped the Browning, which was seized and later found its way into the hands of the IRA. The two barely conscious soldiers were dragged into a waiting taxi, where PIRA men – or at worst, sympathisers – continued to beat them, tearing their clothes off in the process. The taxi was followed by another car, which then drove away to a plot of land where the beating and interrogation continued. It is alleged that the soldiers, through swollen lips and broken teeth, admitted that they were military, but that they were from the Signals. What sealed their fate, however, was the fact that their MOD90s (identity cards) named their location as Herford Barracks in West Germany. The IRA men thought that this read ‘Hereford’, home of their feared enemy: the SAS.
One unnamed PIRA man who was present at the murders later said, ‘It was blind panic, just that. I was there, and I panicked with everyone else. The soldiers were never SAS or undercover guys. They were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.’*
The two men were then taken away in the same taxi to the rear of Casement Park, close to the St Agnes Community Centre. They were thrown over a high metal fence; however, one of the badly injured soldiers caught his leg on the spiked part of the railings, and his thigh was impaled. On the other side of the fence, PIRA men, impatient to get on with the ‘sport’, dragged him over, ripping open his inner thigh, exposing muscle and bone. At one stage, Wood, who seems to have being feigning unconsciousness, tried to make a run for it, but he was dragged back before being shot. The men had been stripped to their white underwear, now red with their blood, both appallingly injured; one of the men’s eyes was dangling loose across his face, connected only by the medial rectus muscle. Within seconds two IRA gunmen shot both at close range; Corporal Wood was shot six times, twice in the head and four times in the chest. He was also stabbed four times in the back of the neck and had multiple injuries to other parts of his body. His comrade was also shot several times.
A local Catholic priest, Father Alec Reid, and journalist Mary Holland were at the scene; both did all that they could to save the men, but their terrible injuries meant that they were clearly beyond any form of help. The courageous priest gave both men the Final Rites of Contrition, risking the enmity of the IRA and no doubt many of the mob who had brought about the two deaths. In the mea
ntime, the two killers had been driven away at speed in a red-coloured Ford, tracked overhead by an Army helicopter. The pilot made every attempt to direct the nearest Army patrol to apprehend them, but the men switched cars, thus evading arrest. An RUC spokesman referred to the very public lynching of the two soldiers as ‘... an obscenity, committed by depraved and perverted people’. Father Reid later told his congregation: ‘We had foul murders committed in our parish yesterday.’
In a later House of Commons debate, Labour MP Kevin McNamara condemned the murders, saying that the soldiers had been ‘...cornered by a bestial pack that had trapped its quarry’.* In the same debate, Tom King, the then Northern Ireland Secretary, told his fellow MPs:
Shortly beforehand they had left the joint police and Army base in North Howard Street mill, after completing a routine maintenance task, in order to return to their unit at Lisburn. They had no reason to be in the vicinity of the funeral. This is not an approved route for soldiers who are not on operational duty at the time, and there is absolutely no question of their being involved in any way with surveillance or any other duties connected with the funeral.
One MP later told the Commons: ‘What happened to the two soldiers was the nearest thing to the crucifixion of Christ that one could see.’
The late Lieutenant Colonel Geoff Moss, who died in 2009, in a conversation with the author in 2008 said:
... there is an unconfirmed report that the rear gunner [in the helicopter] is heard requesting permission to open fire with his GPMG, but none is forthcoming and the two IRA men, already identified at that stage, put their jackets to cover their heads and faces. One gunman shoots the first man – lying unconscious and helpless – in the head and the helicopter comes down even lower. At this stage, the second badly hurt Corporal is seen fighting like a demon as he fights to save his life and at this moment gunman ‘X’ shoots him in the head. The second gunman then calmly shoots both men twice even though they are at this stage, probably already dead.