Terror Attacks

by Ann Williams

  The 6.8 kg (15 lb) explosive device was planted in the recreation centre changing room at the Royal Marine School of Music on September 22, 1989. The blast, which happened just before 8.30 a.m., was so powerful that that it destroyed all three floors of the building and blew the roof completely off. Many houses in the neighbourhood were also damaged, and people who lived within a few kilometres of the barracks said they heard the blast quite clearly and it was very frightening.

  As soon as the dust started to settle, rescue workers and marines alike worked furiously to try to clear the rubble. In desperation they grabbed at the debris with their bare hands, not wanting to wait until the heavy lifting equipment arrived in case their comrades were trapped underneath. The explosion had been so powerful that it wasn’t until four hours later that rescuers found the body of a young man on top of a roof nearby.

  Kent ambulance workers, who were on strike at the time, voluntarily agreed to stop their industrial action and started to take casualties to the nearby hospitals at Deal and Canterbury.

  Musicians and buglers could join the Royal Marines School of Music from the age of 16 and onwards, so the majority of the victims in Deal were young men, most still in their teens. Prior to the explosion many of the recruits had been in the recreation area having breakfast, but by 8.30 a.m. they were undergoing marching practice and actually saw the roof lift off the building and the walls collapse. For days afterwards the young men were in a state of shock, unable to believe that so men of their friends had been needlessly killed.

  In total 22 men were injured and 10 were killed. One of the young marines who had managed to survive the explosion, died one month later, bringing the total of deaths to 11.

  Despite the advancement in forensic science, the police were not able to uncover enough evidence to bring about a conviction, and to this day no one has been arrested for the atrocity that occurred on September 22.

  PART OF A CAMPAIGN

  The Provisional Irish Republican Army claimed responsibility for the bombing, claiming that it was part of a campaign against the British armed forces who had been deployed in Northern Ireland for the past 20 years.

  The nation was shocked at the attack because these were not ordinary soldiers but Royal Marines, and on top of that they were bandsmen. The Royal Marines Bands provide military bands, orchestras and dance bands for state occasions, major national and service events, and for ship and shore ceremonial and social functions. They are dedicated musicians, not fighters, which meant the IRA had struck innocent victims in their fight to free their country of British involvement.

  However, the Corps were not strangers to terror attacks, the Admiral of the Fleet, Earl Mountbatten of Burma, was murdered on August 27, 1979. A bomb exploded while his family were on a fishing trip in Mullaghmore in County Sligo. Other victims of the explosion were Dowager Lady Brabourne, his elder daughter’s mother-in-law, the Earl’s grandson, Nicholas, and a local boatman. Nicholas’s twin brother, Timothy, and his mother and father were critically injured. The Irish National Liberation Army claimed responsibility for this attack.

  In October 1981, the then Commandant General of the Royal Marines, Lt. Gen. Sir Steuart Pringle, was badly injured when he started his car, triggering off an explosive device hidden on the underside. When people rushed to his aid he was concerned that there might be a second device and told them not to come too close. The general’s dog survived unscathed, but he lost a leg in the explosion, which the IRA claimed was their responsibility.

  MARCHING AGAIN

  Just one week after the explosion at the Royal Marines School of Music, the Band marched through the streets of Deal. To show support for their courage thousands of people lined the streets and applauded in appreciation. The members of the band left gaps in their ranks for each member that was no longer able to take part either due to death or injury.

  In 1992 a memorial bandstand was erected in memory of those who died on that fateful day. The memorial itself stands on top of an ancient capstan on Walmer Green, and it bears the names of the 11 musicians ‘who only ever wanted to play music’. A memorial service is held every year at the site of the explosion, with one minute’s silence held at 8.22 a.m., exactly the time the bomb went off. The concert hall at the Deal barracks, which was originally a church, was badly damaged by fire in May 2003. The majority of the building had to be demolished as it was unsafe, but one single wall remains today, which is being retained as part of a memorial garden of remembrance. The Royal Marines School of Music moved out of their barracks in the 1990s and now trains back in its original home in Portsmouth.

  Part Five: 1990–2006

  The Murder Of Ian Gow

  There are thousands of decent people who want nothing more than to live in peace in what I will always think of as God’s own province.

  Tom Utley

  The murder of a British member of Parliament, Ian Gow, by the Irish Republican Army (IRA), illustrated the organization’s contempt for democratic, or indeed, human values. Gow’s mentor was another British MP, Airey Neave, who was killed in the House of Commons car park on March 30, 1979. Neave had had a remarkable life before he became an MP. He was educated at Eton and Oxford, and managed to escape from Colditz in 1942, and on returning to England was recruited as an intelligence officer for M19. When he died he was a Conservative MP for Abingdon and had proved to be a prominent politician. His killers were never caught and intrigue still hangs over his death.

  Ian Gow was under no illusion that he had become a prime target by the IRA, by choosing to identify himself with Northern Ireland and for his support of the Unionist cause.

  IAN GOW THE MP

  Ian Gow was born on February 10, 1937. He married Jane Elizabeth Price in 1966 and they had one son. Gow was both a politician and a solicitor, and he joined the Conservative Party in February 1974 as member for Eastbourne, East Sussex. He soon made an impression on all his political colleages and his debating abilities on the floor of the Chamber became legendary.

  Gow will go down in parliamentary history as the first person to speak in the House of Commons in front of television cameras. He was an articulate, intelligent and witty man and his speech was received well by both audiences – those in the chamber and the television viewers.

  His early years in parliament were filled with difficult problems such as the Rhodesian negotiations and the Falklands War. However, Gow handled pressure well and proved to be a great asset.

  Gow made his mark in the House of Commons when he assisted his associate, Airey Neaves, with Northern Ireland issues. In 1979, when Margaret Thatcher came into power, Gow was offered the position of Parliamentary Private Secretary.

  In 1983, he left the doors of Number 10 to take on a ministerial office, and he threw himself into the role as Minister for Housing with great verve. He showed his usual energy and enthusiasm and soon made his own impact on the problems of housing issues up and down the country.

  In 1985, Gow moved on to the Treasury, but it was here that problems started to arise. His downfall was the fact that he was a staunch Unionist with a deep interest in the affairs of Ulster. He feelings ran so deep he was asked to resign in 1985 over the signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement. It was an historic agreement signed by Margaret Thatcher and Garrett Fitzgerald, who was head of the government of the Republic of Ireland, on November 15, 1985, at Hillsborough Castle in County Down.

  It was an agreement that was aimed at bringing an end to the troubles in Northern Ireland, but instead it plunged the area into turmoil. Unionists who had not been consulted, reacted with shock, anger and humiliation to the pact that offered Dublin a say in the affairs of Northern Ireland.

  There were violent reactions all over Ireland to the agreement, which was vehemently rejected by the Republicans because it confirmed that Northern Ireland would remain part of the UK.

  The Provisional IRA, who also refused to sign the agreement, continued their reign of terror. The national Fianna Fáil party in the Republic o
f Ireland rejected the agreement and the future President of Ireland, Mary Robinson, resigned from the Irish Labour Party over the exclusion of the Unionists.

  On the other side of the coin, the Unionists rejected the agreement because they felt it gave the Republic of Ireland an increased influence over Northern Ireland. The agreement not only failed to bring an end to the political violence in Northern Ireland, it did nothing to bring the two communities any closer to a reconciliation.

  MURDER VICTIM

  Ian Gow was preparing to leave his farmhouse near Eastbourne, East Sussex, on July 30, 1990. He climbed into the driver’s seat of his Austin Montego, completely unaware that the IRA had planted a bomb underneath one of the seats. At exactly 8.39 a.m. the bomb exploded, leaving Gow with appalling injuries to the lower part of his body. His wife, who was inside the house at the time of the explosion, rushed out to see what had happened, but her husband died ten minutes later.

  The IRA claimed responsibility for the attack, possibly hoping that the assassination would be a major setback to the Northern Ireland peace discussions. However, politicians on both sides remained resolute in trying to find a peaceful way to end the on-going dispute between the two countries.

  Ian Gow’s seat in the House of Commons was filled by David Bellotti, a Liberal Democrat. Ann Widdecombe, a Conservative MP who is known for her outspoken conservatism, stirred up a hornet’s nest after Bellotti’s election by saying, ‘the IRA would be toasting their success’.

  The police did question two IRA members over the murder of Ian Gow, but they have never been brought to trial.

  IAN GOW MEMORIAL FUND

  The former chancellor and foreign secretary, Geoffrey Howe, the former archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie and the former chief of the general staff, Field Marshal Lord Bramall, set up a fund for Ian Gow. With Gow’s deep love of Ulster in mind, the fund was an effort to promote understanding between the feuding communities in Ireland. It also invests in young people between the ages of 16 and 30 who are from a disadvantaged background, encouraging them to help themselves.

  The fund has been in existence for 16 years now and has raised and distributed in excess of £850,000. More than 2,500 individuals have benefitted, including victims of the Omagh bomb in 1998, in which 28 people died.

  The injustice of the death of Ian Gow seems overwhelming, in a country that is supposed to encourage freedom of speech it seems he had to pay for his criticism of the Irish peace process.

  World Trade Center Bombing

  On February 26, 1993, a bomb set by terrorists exploded below this site. This horrible act of violence killed innocent people, injured thousands, and made victims of us all.

  Inscription on a granite memorial fountain

  The bomb attack on the World Trade Center that took place on February 26, 1993, was a frightening warning of what was to come eight years later, when al-Qaeda launched its massive 9/11 offensive on the United States of America. In the 1993 New York attack, six people died and over 1,000 were wounded as a bomb exploded in an underground section of the North Tower, shutting down the lights inside the building and causing chaos. Later, a total of ten Islamic extremists were convicted of the attack and sentenced to life imprisonment, including the ringleader, Ramzi Yousef, who was described by the judge as ‘an apostle of evil’.

  CHAOS AND FEAR

  The attack began at just after midday, when a Ryder self-hire removal truck packed with explosives detonated in the underground garage of the North Tower at the World Trade Center. The bomb made a tremendous hole in four levels of concrete, and cyanide gas was released into the air – however it burned up in the explosion. A good deal of damage was done to the building, and six people in the vicinity died, most of them workers at the Port Authority. There were serious injuries to hundreds more. Fortunately, the damage was much more limited than the bombers planned it to be: the North Tower did not collapse onto the neighbouring tower, as they had hoped, which would have caused the deaths of thousands of innocent victims.

  Instead, the electricity grid to the center was cut off, and smoke rose high up into the buildings. The stairwells were plunged into darkness and a pall of acrid smoke rose up through them. Radio, television and telephone services were also disrupted, some of them for weeks afterwards. All in all, it was an extremely frightening experience, and one that deeply shocked New Yorkers, especially when it became known how damaging the attack might have been if all had gone according to the terrorists’ plan.

  After the incident, the New York authorities became aware that security was not tight enough in the World Trade Center and realized that emergency measures would have to be improved in future. Accordingly, among other measures, extra lighting was installed in the stairwells. This improvement is thought to have saved hundreds of lives eight years later, when the 9/11 attack on the twin towers occurred.

  DEADLY BOMBS

  After the 1993 attack, several suspects were arrested, some of whom were later freed and added to the US list of most wanted terrorirsts. Their testimony led to the arrest of Ramzi Yousef, a Kuwait-born Palestinian, who had travelled to the USA on a false passport, claiming political asylum. It was found that, once in the USA, he had made contact with several other terrorists, including Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, later convicted as one of the perpetrators of 9/11.

  Yousef and his associates began to make bombs at his home in New Jersey, putting together an unusually complex and deadly bomb for their attack on the World Trade Center. Their bomb included urea pellets and sodium cyanide, which Yousef hoped would travel through the ventilation shafts of the building and poison those above ground. Fortunately, the cyanide seems to have burnt up in the explosion, and his vicious plan was foiled.

  VIOLENT THUG

  Prior to the attack on the World Trade Center, Yousef contacted several New York newspapers, identifying himself as the Fifth Battalion of the Liberation Army, and demanding an end to diplomatic relations between Israel and the USA. He accused Israel of state terrorism and announced that its actions would be met with terrorism. Yousef also threatened that the attack on the World Trade Center would be the first of many Islamic actions around the world if his demands were not met.

  Yousef was not bluffing. After escaping from New York in the aftermath of the bombing, using a Pakistani passport, he travelled to Pakistan. In the summer of that year, he attempted the assassination of the Pakistani Prime Minister, Benazir Bhutto, at the behest of a terrorist organization called Sipah Sahaba. This was a group of Sunni Muslims known for their violent acts, such as beheadings, against other Muslims sects. When Yousef and an accomplice, Abdul Hakim Murad, were discovered planting the bomb outside the Prime Minister’s residence, the bomb blew up, injuring Yousef, who was taken to hospital by Murad, and recovered.

  The following year, Yousef travelled to Bangkok, where he took part in the attempted bombing of the Israeli embassy. While driving towards the embassy, his truck crashed into a motorcyclist, and the plan was aborted. After the debacle, Yousef went back to Pakistan, where he helped to mastermind the notorious Bonjinka plot.

  OPERATION BOJINKA

  Bojinka, meaning ‘bang’ or ‘explosion’, was a plan to mount a number of terror attacks against the West in an all-out bombing offensive. The plot was bankrolled by the terrorist organization al-Qaeda, and the money laundered through Filipino girlfriends of the terrorists. The outrageous plan, which presaged the attacks of 9/11, was to blow up 11 aeroplanes, to assassinate Pope John Paul II, and to crash a plane into the headquarters of the CIA in Virginia. Thankfully, the plot was discovered before any of these attacks actually took place; however, al-Qaeda learned a great deal from the experience of mounting this major offensive, which they later used in the attacks of 2001.

  Operating under the name of Adam Sali and living in Manila, Philippines, Yousef began to make and test bombs in his apartment in an ordinary residential area of the city. One of the bombs was placed in a Manila theatre, injuring several people, and anoth
er was hidden aboard a Boeing 747, which killed one passenger. Amazingly, the plane made an emergency landing and the other passengers survived.

  Having checked that these small-scale bombs worked, Yousef and his co-conspirators began to test their plans for attacking the airlines, smuggling explosives onto a United States airlines to see if they could get through security. This was terrorism on a scale never seen before, and had the plan worked, it is estimated that several thousand people would have been killed.

  However, Operation Bojinka was abandoned when a fire broke out at Yousef’s apartment in Manila. When firefighters arrived, Yousef and his accomplice Murad fled, and police searched the apartment, finding huge quantities of chemicals and electrical timers there. The evidence could not have been more compelling. Bubbling away in the kitchen sink was a cocktail of explosive chemicals, and beside it was a handbook on how to build a liquid bomb, written in Arabic. Moreover, when Yousef’s computer was switched on, it was full of files about Operation Bojinka: everything from plane timetables to names of associates to terrorist political statements. The police had stumbled on a bomb factory. The search was now on for the two terrorists who had abandoned it.

  THE CULPRITS