The Spanish police have stated since the killings that they informed their British counterparts that all three were unarmed and were not in possession of any explosive devices. It is worth noting that the day following the killings the British government in parliament thanked the Spanish for their co-operation.
The Actual Killings
At 12.30pm Seán Savage drove into Gibraltar in a white Renault 5 car. Indeed, he entered the colony using a passport in the name of Coyne, which was known to the authorities. He parked the car in a parking area where on the following Tuesday a British army band was to assemble. He did all this under the watchful eye of the British military. My sister and Dan McCann crossed the border at 2.30pm and met Seán Savage near the parked car. They then set out to return to Spain with Dan McCann and Mairéad walking together. Seán Savage, who was following behind them, turned at a road junction and walked back again in the direction of the town centre, away from the border.
As the pair passed a petrol station a police siren sounded and they turned to see at least two armed SAS soldiers in plain clothes approach them. According to one of the principal independent witnesses, Carmen Proetta, who lives in a flat overlooking the garage, both Dan and Mairéad raised their hands in surrender. Despite that the soldiers opened fired.
Carmen Proetta was discovered not by the police but by a researcher working for Thames Television which was making a programme on the shootings entitled Death on the Rock. The researcher believed Ms Proetta’s evidence because it coincided with another account she had received from a person who did not wish to come forward publicly.[3]
Ms Proetta told Thames television, ‘They [security forces] didn’t do anything ... they just went and shot these people. That’s all. They didn’t say anything, they didn’t scream, they didn’t shout, they didn’t do anything. These people were turning their heads back to see what was happening, and when they saw these men had guns in their hands they put their hands up. It looked like the man was protecting the girl because he stood in front of her, but there was no chance. I mean they went to the floor immediately, they dropped’.[4]
Another independent witness Stephen Bullock who was 150 yards from the shooting saw Dan McCann falling backwards with his hands at shoulder height. The gunman was about four feet away. At the inquest into the killings Mr Bullock, a lawyer by profession, stated, ‘I think with one step he could have actually touched the person he was shooting’.[5]
Both Carmen Proetta and Stephen Bullock gave further evidence, along with a third witness Josie Celecia, whose flat faces the petrol station, that the soldiers fired on Dan McCann and my sister as they lay on the ground.
The scientific evidence presented by the pathologist Professor Alan Watson at the inquest corroborated this evidence. Mairéad had been killed by three bullets fired into her back – at a distance of a few feet according to the forensic evidence – all of the wounds were within two and a half inches of each other. The upward trajectory of the bullets meant that the gunman was either kneeling and shooting upwards or that my sister was on the ground or close to it when these shots were fired. These three shots were the fatal ones. Mairéad had died from gunshot wounds to the heart and liver. She had also head wounds, but these were superficial. Professor Watson believed she had first been shot in the face and then in the back. In other words, even after initially shooting Mairéad in the face she was still alive and could have been arrested. In total she was shot eight times.
The pathologist further believed that Dan McCann had been first shot in the jaw. This had stunned him and then the lethal shots ‘when he was down or very far down’ were fired. Dan had two entry bullet wounds in his back which were again close together. The trajectory of the bullets were also upward. He had an entry bullet wound at the top left back of his head, which also strongly suggests he was on the ground when this shot was fired.
The Killing of Seán Savage
At the time Mairéad and Dan were shot Seán Savage was walking in the opposite direction towards the town centre. He was being followed by two members of the SAS (referred to as Soldiers C and D at the inquest) who said they were only five or six feet behind Seán when the shots that killed Mairéad and Dan rang out. According to the soldiers Seán spun round at this point and one of the soldiers claimed to shout a warning and then proceeded to open fire; the second soldier then followed suit.
There were three independent witnesses to this shooting. Diana Treacy told the inquest that she saw two men running towards her. After she was passed by the first one, who was Seán Savage, the second man who had a gun opened fire. She saw this same gunman fire up to five shots into Seán as he lay on the ground.
Another independent witness was a British holiday-maker, Mr Robyn Mordue. In the commotion of the shooting he was knocked to the ground when a woman on a bicycle collided with him. He thought there was a madman on the rampage, as he saw a man who had been walking towards him being shot again and again. He got up and ran behind a car where he was sick. He then looked back at the death scene, but what he saw is not clear. Mr Mordue was a very nervous witness. He had reason to be nervous. Before the inquest his identity was only known by the authorities. Nevertheless, in the weeks leading up to the inquest he received a number of threatening phone calls, ‘Bastard ... stay away’. Mr Mordue’s telephone number is ex-directory.
Kenneth Asquez was the third witness to this killing. He had alleged in two statements – one hand-written and the other before a lawyer but all unsigned in order to hide his identity – to Thames television that he saw a man with his foot on Seán Savage’s chest, firing at him at point blank range. Up until the inquest he had remained anonymous, but he decided to retract this statement. However, Asquez’s retraction must be treated with scepticism. As the handwritten statement said, the man with his foot on Seán’s chest was wearing a black beret and the shooting was prefaced by the shout ‘Stop, it’s okay it’s the police.’ In fact, one of the soldiers who shot Seán had donned a black beret and the shooting had been prefaced with these words. But until the inquest these two facts had not been publicised. At the inquest many observers believed that Kenneth Asquez had also been put under pressure by those who feared the truth. Mr Asquez must surely have feared being vilified by the British gutter press the same way Carmen Proetta had been for telling exactly what she saw. In fact, the Windlesham/Rampton Report records that ‘local people were afraid to speak about what they might have seen’[6] to Thames television researchers and that was before Carmen Proetta was slandered.
The scientific evidence produced by Professor Watson was damning. Seán had twenty-nine wounds in what the pathologist described as ‘a frenzied attack’. He believed that between 16 and 18 bullets had hit Seán. He had seven head wounds, five of them were presumed to be entry wounds. Our lawyer, Mr Paddy McGrory, showed Professor Watson at the inquest a photograph taken by the police of four circled strike marks within the outline of Seán’s head. This was the first time the pathologist had seen this photograph. He was asked by our lawyer whether it seemed as though these four shots had been fired into Seán’s head as he lay on the ground. Professor Watson replied: ‘Yes, that would be reasonable.’
The Role of the Police
The role of the police in investigating these three killings must be questioned. In the case of witnesses to Seán Savage’s death the inquest was told that there were some thirty people who saw the shooting. However, there were only three independent witnesses found and two of them were discovered by the media. The same was true for witnesses to the shooting of my sister and Dan McCann. The police failed, for example, to set up the customary incidents’ centres in the vicinity of the killings.
There is in police methodology a universal principle known as the preservation of the scene of the crime. It was applied sparingly in Gibraltar on that day. Within minutes of the killings, the police had ensured that it would be extremely difficult to reconstruct the killings. Spent cartridges were collected without first marking where
they had been found. The bodies were removed without first photographing them in situ. The bodies of Mairéad and Dan McCann were not chalked around. The killers were not interviewed by the police until two weeks afterwards.
Normal police practice was disregarded just as it was in 1982 when six unarmed civilians were killed in County Armagh, Northern Ireland by an SAS-trained RUC team. There the police, too, failed to preserve the scenes of the shootings. As a result valuable evidence was tampered with and lost. Also the RUC, just like their Gibraltar counterparts, were recalcitrant in the search for eye-witnesses; they too failed to set up the customary incidents’ centres in the vicinity of the killings. The similarities between these killings would suggest a set plan for the execution of unarmed dissidents.
In the Gibraltar case the positive obstruction of the establishment of the facts concerning the shootings continued. The pathologist, Professor Watson, was not given the normal co-operation. The hospital had an X-ray machine, which he would need to trace the track of the bullets through the bodies, but it was not put at his disposal. The clothing had already been removed; torn fabric can help determine entry and exit wounds, while the spread of blood stains could indicate whether the three were upright or prone when they were shot. The photographs taken in the morgue were inadequate, the police photographer not being under Professor Watson’s supervision at the time. He was not supplied with surgical assistance. Subsequently he was not given any copies of the ballistic and forensic reports, nor the reports on the blood samples he had submitted in London on his return to Britain. The systematic disruption of routine procedures parallels exactly the persistent refusal to arrest the three suspects at numerous opportunities.
The forensic scientist, David Pryor of the London Metropolitan Police, had also been hampered in his work. The blood soaked clothes had been sent to him in bags. ‘The clothing was in such a condition when I received it,’ said Pryor, ‘that accurate determination of which was an entry site and which an exit was very difficult.’
Another peculiar feature was the fact that the evidence of the pathologist and the forensic scientist, although complementary, did not directly follow one another at the inquest. Instead, Professor Watson testified on 8 September 1988 and Mr Pryor on 27 September, with the result that the significance of the combined evidence was deliberately blurred. What Pryor’s evidence did make clear is that the powder marks found on Mairéad’s jacket and Seán Savage’s shirt indicated the gun that killed Mairéad was fired at her from a distance of three feet, and the gun fired at Seán’s chest was at a distance of four to six feet. In other words, the obvious question arising from the scientific evidence, too, was: why were these three unarmed people not arrested rather than killed?
The British Version
By the time the inquest was held, six months after the killings, the British government had prepared what they saw as a credible story. Despite having publicly praised in the House of Commons the role of the Spanish police in the surveillance of the three, the British authorities began to claim that the Spanish had in fact lost track of the three on 6 March 1988 and that their appearance in Gibraltar took the British security forces by surprise. The British authorities believed, the story goes, that the Renault 5 driven into Gibraltar by Seán Savage – supposedly unnoticed – was packed with explosives. On top of that, the security forces were convinced that the bomb was to be detonated by remote control. The soldiers in their testimony claimed that the movements of the three seemed to indicate that they were about to use a ‘button job’, as they described it in tabloid-speak, and therefore had to be shot to death.
To back up the claim that the Spanish police had lost the three the Gibraltar police tried to present a copy of an alleged statement from a Spanish police inspector, Rayo Valenzuela, supporting this line. Our lawyer objected to its admissibility as the police inspector, who supposedly made it, would not be attending the inquest and therefore would not be available for cross-examination. It now transpires that this document is totally fraudulent. Not only was the statement unsworn, but the English translation delivered to the coroner was even unsigned.
However, a sworn statement does exist and was sent to the Gibraltar authorities. On 11 April 1990 the Spanish Minister of the Interior told the Spanish Senate that a Spanish police officer made a statement for the inquest, which was sworn before a judge. This statement was never presented to the inquest.
Any attempt by our solicitor, Paddy McGrory, to probe into the surveillance operation was made impossible with the issuing of a Public Interest Immunity Certificate by the British government. Nevertheless, this aspect of the official story was exposed when the head of Gibraltar’s Special Branch, Detective Chief Inspector Joseph Ullger, gave evidence. He admitted that the authorities had deliberately allowed the three to enter Gibraltar in order to gather evidence for a subsequent trial. It also became apparent that on 6 March a member of the Gibraltar police was present on the Spanish side of passport control with the aliases and passport numbers of the three. So when Seán Savage crossed the border using the known pseudonym in the name of Coyne he was immediately identifiable.
The British gave no real evidence to back-up their claim that the notional bomb in the white Renault would be detonated by remote control. The only fact presented by Mr O, a senior British intelligence officer, was that an alleged IRA arms cache had been uncovered in Belgium and it had contained a remote control device. This had supposedly led the authorities to believe that the Gibraltar bomb would also be detonated in such a way. This has since been shown to have been a lie, because what made the Belgian police believe they had discovered an IRA cache was the fact that the devices for detonating the semtex were not of a remote control variety. The remote control detonating theory totally contradicted what ‘official sources’ told the BBC on the evening of Sunday 6 March 1988, which referred to a bomb that was ‘timed’ to kill British army bandsmen on the Tuesday. The following day the Minister of State for the Armed Forces, Mr Ian Stewart, repeated this point on the BBC’s Today programme.
The other argument put forward by Mr O to explain the flawed remote control theory was that the IRA by employing this device wanted to ensure that there was not a repeat of the Enniskillen bombing in which many civilians were killed. This argument contradicts the view instilled into the SAS soldiers who carried out the killings. They told the inquest that the three at all costs had to be prevented from using the remote control detonator. If the IRA did not want to incur civilian casualties why would they detonate this notional bomb in the Renault 5 car on a Sunday afternoon when only civilians would be injured? Besides, it was scientifically proven at the inquest that the three could never have detonated any bomb supposedly in the Renault from where they were killed. If the authorities were so certain that there was a bomb in the car, why then did it take them several hours to make the area ‘safe’? The probable answer to this question is that they simply did not think there was a bomb at all. Soldier G at the inquest testified that he thought there was a bomb in the car. Further information supplied by the British press since the inquest suggests he was accompanied on that day by two better qualified personnel who disagreed with his opinion. Their presence was concealed from the inquest. This suggestion has never been discounted by the authorities.
Nevertheless, according to the four killers, these three people, who were unarmed and did not have a bomb or possess any detonating devices, made threatening movements when they were approached by armed men. Why should they do such a foolish thing? The true answer to this question is that they didn’t make any threatening movements. This was revealed to Roger Boulton, the editor of the Thames television programme Death on the Rock, by a senior Conservative politician who said: ‘Of course there was a Shoot-to-Kill policy in Gibraltar just as we had in the Far East and in Aden’.[7]
Aftermath
In the days immediately following the killings, as we waited for the remains of our loved ones to be brought home, the families had to endure con
siderable harassment and intimidation from the RUC. For example, on 8 March I was spotted by the police leaving my parents’ home by car with my sister’s boyfriend. For no reason other than to insult us the RUC stopped my car and began to make obscene sexual remarks about Mairéad. All the other families were to experience similar harassment throughout this period and, in fact, the McCann family continue to this day to be harassed.
The McCanns own a butcher’s shop on Belfast’s Falls Road and British soldiers regularly shout obscene remarks in at the parents. Dan’s brother almost on a daily basis is stopped and abused by British soldiers while escorting his child to school.
But in the days leading up to the funeral the families were visited by an RUC officer who threatened us with dire consequences if we fulfilled the wishes of our loved ones to be buried as members of the IRA.
The remains of Mairéad, Seán and Dan were flown from Gibraltar to Dublin and from there they were to be brought by road to Belfast. From the moment we crossed the border into Northern Ireland the remains were literally kidnapped by the RUC. As we followed behind the RUC jeeps, it was noticeable how they deliberately slowed down when we passed hostile crowds making us easy targets for missiles. When we reached the M1, some ten miles from Belfast, an RUC road-block prevented the relatives from following the cortège. The remains of the three were not brought to their homes until much later.
After approximately 30 minutes, the relatives who were in three cars were allowed to proceed onto the motorway, while the other mourners were made to take another route. On the motorway, we were stopped by the RUC again and held for at least two hours. Many of the relatives were subjected to considerable abuse. Two aunts had accompanied me to meet the remains in Dublin and they stated afterwards that this period, stuck on the M1 surrounded by hundreds of RUC men, was without doubt the most frightening experience of the aftermath, including the gun and grenade attack on the actual funeral. The actions of the RUC throughout this whole period underlined time and again how sectarian a force it is. It exposed the nonsense of the Dublin government who considered it a breakthrough when they got the assurance of the British authorities that RUC men would accompany the Ulster Defence Regiment, another sectarian body, when on patrol.
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