by Mark Urban
The soldiers said that, as the motorcycle came into the hospital, Fleming had a pistol in his hand. This was disputed later, at the inquest. The soldiers say they shouted at the men to stop. They did not do so and Soldier A, at the wheel of a blue Fiat, drove his car at the IRA men. The motorbike was rammed with such force that Fleming’s right leg was shattered and he fell to the ground. Among the exhibits listed by the police Scene of Crime Officer was ‘LS11 Sample of fleshy material’, which had been ‘recovered from the offside front wing’ of Soldier A’s Fiat.
Soldier A fired at Fleming with his 9 mm pistol. Soldier B used his pistol and then got his HK53 out of the car and fired it. Soldier B and Soldier C continued to fire at Doherty as he tried to escape on the motorcycle. Soldier C fired at the bike, ‘thinking my own life and that of Soldier B was in immediate danger’. He emptied the thirty-round magazine of his MP5K at Doherty.
Some fifty-nine rounds were fired in a few moments. Doherty was hit nineteen times, falling from the bike. Fleming had taken four rounds. Both men died. Doherty left a wife and an eight-month-old boy.
There was a strong public reaction after the deaths. The IRA claimed Doherty had been hit thirty-eight times and Fleming thirty, allegations exposed as false by the post-mortem examinations. A local unionist politician described the shootings as ‘an early Christmas present’. Neil Kinnock, the opposition Labour Party leader, called for an inquiry, justifying his request by saying, ‘It is because of fear that there might have been a change of policy on “shoot-to-kill” and I want clarification on that policy.’ Douglas Hurd, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, denied that there had been any change in security policy.
At the men’s funerals there were scuffles and confrontations with the police. As at Tony MacBride’s funeral, the RUC intervened to try to prevent paramilitary displays. A senior republican says that from late 1983 the police took a more active role in trying to prevent paramilitary ‘honour guards’ firing shots at funerals.
20
The Strabane Shootings
In February 1985 the Int and Sy Group went into action again. It was to be the fourth occasion in five months in which members of the unit were involved in a fatal shooting incident. However, it would grow in reputation to be the most controversial of the killings. As in Tamnamore in October 1984 and in Kesh and Londonderry in December, the events which took place in Strabane resulted from the exploitation of informer intelligence.
An IRA ASU in the predominantly Catholic town of Strabane was given the assignment of attacking an RUC vehicle on patrol. The ASU was well armed for the task, with anti-armour grenades which had been specially developed and manufactured by the Provisionals’ technical experts. They had also hidden near the town a variety of military weapons including Belgian-made FNC rifles, which fire rounds similar to the Armalite but are more modern. Their plan was to ambush an RUC vehicle with the grenades and shoot at any survivors as they emerged.
The Special Branch TCG North mobilized Army and RUC units to mount an operation against the ASU. During the early part of February the ASU and undercover soldiers danced a gavotte through the rolling countryside around the town. A squad from the RUC’s N Division Mobile Support Unit was also sent to the area. The DMSU was there to act as a QRF for the undercover soldiers and to move in and secure an area in the event of a battle with IRA members. From time to time areas were placed out of bounds to security forces vehicles in case they ran into the IRA ambush. The manoeuvrings ended on 23 February.
On 22 February four SAS soldiers had travelled down from Londonderry after being briefed there by intelligence officers. From conversations with a soldier familiar with the case, it would appear that they had been told the probable location of the ASU’s arms dump. That night three soldiers went to investigate the cache. It does not appear – despite the strength of later nationalist feeling to the contrary – that their intention was to mount an ambush that night.
The Army knew from intelligence that they might encounter anything up to five or six terrorists, so it hardly seems likely that they would have chosen to ambush them with just three men. The three soldiers in question took up a position overlooking a suspected IRA arms dump. A fourth soldier was manning the radio at a nearby security forces base, where he was in charge of the Quick Reaction Force. It would appear that the four who had travelled down from Londonderry were not the only Int and Sy Group soldiers in the area that night. There were probably two others riding in an unmarked car whose mission was to back up the team in the Observation Post. Their role seems to have had more in common with that of the surveillance team which was attacked at Dunloy, for example, than with the deployment of groups of six to twelve SAS men at incidents like Tamnamore or the Gransha hospital. Indeed, in its first report of the incident the Sinn Fein newspaper An Phoblacht/Republican News stated that the British soldiers had probably been engaged in ‘routine surveillance work’, although it gave a confused version of where they had been.
One journalist who has covered the Strabane incident suggested to me that the three men in the OP were in fact surveillance operators rather than members of the SAS. I do not believe this, having had their identity as SAS soldiers confirmed by two members of the Regiment and a senior security forces officer. Were they then SAS soldiers sent simply to see what they could find out, or were they on an OP/React mission – in other words an ambush – where they understood they would be clear to engage any terrorist who appeared?
Once again, the numbers of men committed would seem to indicate that it was a genuine observation mission. It was to become a hallmark of SAS OP/React missions that far more soldiers would be deployed than the two or three considered appropriate for a real OP.
On the same night, the IRA unit had been out trying to ambush a police car. Five ASU members spent the early hours of 23 February in a fruitless wait for quarry. When their patience was spent, Declan Crossan, twenty-one, and another Provisional took off their rubber gloves and handed their weapons to the other three for returning to a cache. Crossan and the other person made their way home. Charles Breslin, a twenty-year-old believed by the police to be the ASU commander, Michael Devine, twenty-two, and his brother David Devine, sixteen years old, walked along carrying the weapons. They were wearing rubber gloves and balaclavas. The anti-armour grenades had been placed in a holdall along with the gloves worn by the other two men. Each of the men carried a loaded assault rifle.
The area where the soldiers were waiting is in a steeply sloping field. At the bottom of the slope runs a thick hedge on the other side of which is a road. A largely Catholic housing estate, known as the Head of the Town, lies along the other side of the road, overlooked by the field. There is a house opposite the estate which nestles in a cutting in the hillside. Behind the building there is a nearby vertical six-or seven-foot slope at the top of which runs a hedge. The soldiers were lying there, looking uphill into the field. It is believed that the IRA members planned to hide the weapons at the side of the enclosure at a point which could be overlooked by the OP.
According to a soldier who spoke to me, the SAS soldiers heard the three Provisionals before they saw them, though this was not what was said later by the Army. As the IRA men walked past the SAS soldiers, only a few metres away, the soldiers opened fire without warning with their HK53 assault rifles. Soldier A fell down the steep bank into the house’s back yard. In the confusion both Soldiers A and B radioed their back-up team to report a contact.
Soldiers B and C carried on firing. Soldier C said in a statement, ‘At this time I heard voices in front of me saying something like “They’re over there – get them”.’ Whether or not it is true that one of the terrorists said this, none of the IRA weapons was fired and two still had their safety catches on when examined later. The SAS men carried on pouring fire into the prostrate IRA men, who were only 5 to 6 metres away, reloading their weapons with fresh magazines as they did so. In all they fired 117 rounds, twenty-eight of which hit Michael Devine. A p
athologist later said his wounds had almost defied interpretation. Before the firing was finished the QRF appeared, having come the short distance from a nearby base. There was a cry of ‘Shoot out the street lights’ and the soldier who was with the QRF fired a burst at some lamp posts.
Local people were to claim that they had heard cries of ‘Don’t shoot, don’t shoot’ from one of the injured Provisionals. The question of whether the SAS finished the men with a coup de grâce as they lay injured on the ground was to emerge as one of the most controversial aspects of the incident. Many extraordinary allegations emerged from the estate – for example, that other soldiers had opened fire with a machine-gun from a cemetery several hundred metres away. This was not borne out by any of the forensic evidence and was denied by soldiers and police.
Immediately after the shooting, soldiers and RUC officers from the QRF broke into a house, searching for other terrorists. This suggests they probably knew there were more than three men in the original ambush party. Crossan was arrested; he subsequently confessed to several terrorist crimes, and in 1986 was sentenced to twenty years in jail. The judge, referring to the fate of Breslin and the Devines, said that Crossan was lucky to be alive and that, ‘They that take up the sword perish by the sword.’ The fifth member of the ambush team has never been charged with involvement in the plan.
Shortly after the Strabane killings, the IRA began a hunt for the source of the leak which had led the men to their deaths. Two days later Kevin Coyle, a twenty-four-year-old republican was found dead in Londonderry’s Bogside. The IRA said he had been an informer for some time, but the police denied it. Some people linked his killing with the Strabane incident, though not the IRA itself. In October of the same year Damien McCrory, a twenty-year-old Strabane Provisional, was found shot dead. The IRA said he had been a traitor who, like the Mahon couple – killed in Belfast a few weeks before – had been given tracking devices to insert in weapons. The IRA said that some people had come forward as a result of the Mahons’ deaths but that, ‘Where we are forced to hunt down touts, they must expect no mercy.’
Many questions remained unanswered after the Strabane incident. Some were to emerge at the inquest held from 3 February to 22 April 1987. It was to be the fullest inquiry of its kind held until then, but, despite this, it produced claims of cover-up and whitewash from many nationalists.
Loyalists did not, on the whole, object to the soldiers’ behaviour. Sammy Wilson, a Democratic Unionist on Belfast Council, said after the Strabane shootings, ‘Talking, reason or persuasion does not work with the IRA so the only answer is to shoot its members; this at least ensures that they will not be available to carry out any more murders of Protestants.’ But while Wilson and the DUP may have their fingers on the pulse of opinion in the working-class Protestant enclaves – and therefore of some elements within the UDR and RUC – there were other Unionists who saw things differently. Enoch Powell, official Unionist MP for south Down from 1974 to 1987, challenged the idea that it was legitimate to exploit foreknowledge to catch armed terrorists in ambushes. ‘I am astonished that the proposition should be put forward that because a person is suspected of preparing to commit a crime, therefore he should be shot without trial’, he was to say after the Gibraltar incident.
The Strabane inquest was extensive because the solicitors representing the families understood the importance of the issues and the need to call many witnesses: In many other cases there was only the most perfunctory hearing. Oistin MacBride, brother of Tony, who was killed in the Kesh incident, remembered that his family ‘were so naïve at the time’. He says the RUC had told them the proceedings were a ‘formality’ and the inquest, at which the MacBrides had no legal representation, was completed in three hours. Some of the inquests have been little more than minor skirmishes between country solicitors, who usually agree to represent the families for free (since there is no legal aid for inquest proceedings) but who have no real experience of such matters, and anonymous security forces witnesses.
Interviews with members of the security forces who have been involved in such incidents, or who have had access to information about them, reveal in many cases a version of events which is significantly different from that presented in court. The concoction of cover stories designed to protect informers and disguise the degree of foreknowledge of a crime had been exposed by the Stalker inquiry. The stories given to courts about incidents involving Army special forces in the period 1983 to 1985 also appear, from the evidence of interviews conducted for this book, to be designed to disguise the amount which SB and Army intelligence officers really knew before an incident. In effect they are designed to preserve not only the sources of that intelligence but also the myth of the ‘clean kill’ – that IRA members lost their lives because they were encountered, armed and in the middle of an operation, when the security forces had no choice but to engage them.
The inquest into the shooting of Doherty and Fleming at the Gransha hospital showed some of the problems of trying to establish the truth in such cases. Throughout the proceedings the Army maintained that the presence of the soldiers in the hospital grounds was in some sense ‘routine’ or part of normal security duties. But committing around ten SAS men – just under half of the total resident SAS contingent in Ulster – in a small area of one city cannot, by definition, be a routine security operation. The officers who control Int and Sy Group require hard intelligence to act on before they will use their scarce resources in this way.
The CID detective chief inspector charged with carrying out the official investigation of the Gransha shootings told the inquest, ‘I can’t say what information was available to the forces prior to this incident.’ This issue, of exactly what they did and did not know, is crucial in forming a judgement about the ethics of how the IRA men met their deaths. Were it to emerge in a court, for example, that they had been followed from their homes, or from the cache where they picked up their weapons, to the place where they intended to kill, then serious questions would have been raised about whether the SAS soldiers had used reasonable and necessary force. It might, for example, have been possible to have ‘jarked’ of ‘fixed’ their guns previously and have captured the IRA men as they picked up the weapons.
Soldier F, the officer who had briefed the soldiers at Gransha, told the court, ‘I had no specific information.’ Yet a person who has reviewed the case claims the soldiers had the ‘perfect tip-off’. His suggestion that they knew exactly who the IRA men’s target was – and even put a soldier on the bus to protect him – never emerged during the court proceedings. Soldier F did admit it would have been better ‘with hindsight’ to have called in the police to have made arrests when the motorcycle was seen in the hospital grounds. This was reflected in the jury’s finding at the end of the inquest, when they said the Army should have called in the police. But the overwhelming likelihood that the operation could not have happened without the knowledge of the Special Branch – through the TCG, part of the police – was not examined in court. Whatever its limits, the Gransha finding was the closest a coroner’s court has come in recent years to censuring Army special forces for their role in such a shooting.
The Strabane inquest focused on a different part of the ‘shoot-to-kill’ conundrum: not on whether there was an alternative to the confrontation but on how the soldiers had behaved during it. This is not promising ground for those seeking to question the soldiers’ behaviour. It had been shown in the Boyle case that even if SAS men end up charged with murder it is very difficult to prove to a court that their version of why they opened fire is untrue, however implausible it might sound. Much of the questioning at Strabane centred on the question of whether the IRA men had been given a coup de grâce as they pleaded for mercy.
Police witnesses said that the cries of ‘Don’t shoot, don’t shoot’ had come not from injured Provisionals but from a frightened motorist, when stopped by members of the QRF on the road. However, they were not able to trace the man, saying he had identifi
ed himself only as ‘Kelly from Plumbridge’. They said they had not taken his full name or car registration number.
Post-mortem evidence showed that each of the IRA men had at least one shot through the head. Yet their balaclavas contained no bullet holes, leading to suggestions that the soldiers had approached them, lifted off the masks to identify the men and then delivered the fatal shots. The soldiers’ statements admitted that they had taken the balaclavas off the men, but said it was after the firing had stopped. The Crown suggested by way of explanation that the bullets might have entered through the balaclavas’ eye holes.
One aspect of the soldiers’ depositions not raised in court was why two of them had suffered ‘stoppages’ (jamming) of their HK53 rifles. The chances of a weapon jamming are slim, particularly when the gun is of a German design, one chosen for its reliability. The chances of two guns jamming are even more remote. I showed an SAS man copies of Soldier A’s and Soldier C’s written depositions. He said he found it ‘very hard to believe’ that both men had had stoppages and that, given the Regiment’s pride in its exhaustive firearms training, they would admit to having their weapons jam even if it had happened.
There is another possible explanation. As the SAS soldiers approached the terrorists they might have drawn their Browning 9 mm automatic pistols. A pistol is a better weapon for a coup de grâce since it causes less trauma to the target’s body when fired very close and poses less of a risk to the firer through the impact of ricochets. Forensic evidence showed that both soldiers did use their 9 mm pistols, so they had to give some explanation for having done so.