Braver Men Walk Away Page 18

  I was tasked to the scene and told about the possible booby-trap. It meant I’d have to enter the apartment before anyone else could. I arrived just before the siege ended and watched it on a closed circuit monitor in the control room. The monitor showed the front of the building. John Matthews came out first, moving carefully across his upper-storey balcony and then into the neighbouring apartment via its French windows. The terrorists followed. They had to go on their hands and knees to negotiate the route.

  I moved in then. Initially I checked the hallway outside the flat, then went upstairs to the first-floor landing. I asked for the explosives sniffer dogs to be let loose; if one of them started barking I could call for a handler to interpret what the dog was signalling. The dogs went ahead of me. The handlers may well have wished to go with their dogs but in a situation like this, minimum risks must be taken.

  The dogs didn’t detect any explosive but one of them was so taken with a listening device which had been covertly stuck to the apartment’s front door that he promptly ate it. I couldn’t begin to imagine what kind of transmission the eavesdroppers were now picking up.

  I went into the neighbouring apartment, clambered across their balcony and then the Matthews’ to gain entry to the apartment. It was in a mess: six people had been living in one room for a week. They’d had food sent in during the closing stages of the siege and the styrofoam containers were everywhere.

  There were no bombs and no booby-traps. The door handles had been connected to heavy pieces of furniture, not to prevent entry but to buy time for the terrorists to reach for their weapons and start shooting.

  I checked the collection of guns left behind. There were two .357 Magnum revolvers loaded with .38 Special, two .38 revolvers and one 9mm Browning Short automatic. They’d also had a Sten gun which they’d either dropped or thrown away during the chase on 6 December, after they’d been intercepted in Rossmore Road. All that firepower and the four of them had run like hell from an unarmed Metropolitan Police inspector.

  The four terrorists were identified as Martin Joseph O’Connell, Edward Butler, Harry Duggan and Hugh Doherty. They later appeared at the Old Bailey on twenty-five separate charges including seven murders.

  The victims were Guinness Book of Records co-author Ross McWhirter, murdered on 27 November 1975; Audrey Edgson, murdered as a result of an explosion at Walton’s restaurant on 18 November; John Francis Batey, murdered as a result of an explosion at Scotts restaurant on 12 November; Gordon Hamilton-Fairey, murdered at Campden Hill Square on 23 October; Graham Ronald Tuck, murdered as a result of an explosion in Piccadilly on 9 October; and Robert Anthony Lloyd, murdered at the Hilton Hotel on 5 September. According to the charge sheet, their first victim was Roger Goad, murdered as a result of an explosion at 229 Kensington Church Street on 29 August.

  The killers were sentenced to life imprisonment.

  After our trip to Turkey in 1978, Ken and I had returned to a city which, having survived the violent onslaught of the IRA in the early seventies, was now experiencing a lull. Terrorist incidents still continued around the world: in February that year Red Brigade terrorists shot and killed a leading Italian judge; in March the Red Brigade kidnapped and subsequently killed Aldo Moro, five times Prime Minister of Italy; in June the President of North Yemen was killed by a parcel bomb; in July £1 million worth of damage was caused overnight by IRA incendiary attacks in Belfast; in August the IRA began bombing BAOR bases in Germany; in September the broadcaster Georgi Markov was killed in London by the Bulgarian secret police (a classic example of state terrorism); in November Basque terrorists shot dead a Spanish judge. Then, in December, IRA terrorists began the bombing of UK provincial cities, including Southampton, Bristol, Coventry and Manchester.

  Within the space of a decade terrorism had become a grim fact of life in Europe.

  In Britain, one man in particular was to bring terrorism into the eighties.

  Patrick Joseph Magee was born on 29 May 1951 in Catholic West Belfast. At the age of three, Magee and his family moved to the UK mainland and settled in Norwich where he was brought up as an English child with an English education.

  In 1966, Magee left school and worked as a labourer. He also tried his hand at shop-breaking but was caught and placed on two years’ probation.

  In 1969, he moved back to Belfast with his family and he was seen in the company of a known Provisional. Two years later, the family returned to England but Magee stayed on. In 1972, at the age of twenty-one, he became the Youth Organizer for the Provisional IRA and was subsequently interned for two years at the Long Kesh Internment Centre. Here, between 1973 and 1975, he found himself in the company of hardened IRA men who quickly realized his potential as a terrorist: Patrick Joseph Magee could easily pass as an Englishman. On his release from Long Kesh he visited two Libyan terrorist training centres to further refine the bomb-making skills he had learned during internment.

  In August 1977, in advance of the Queen’s visit to Coleraine University, Northern Ireland, a search of the grounds uncovered devices featuring a previously unused type of electronic long-delay timer. The bombs were timed to explode twelve days later when the Queen was actually on the campus.

  It was the first known operational use of long-delay timers.

  Further discoveries of devices with long-delay timers were made in Germany and mainland UK including a dozen hidden under floorboards at a flat in Greenwich in January 1979. Forensic evidence concluded that this had been a safe house for an IRA bombing team.

  In June 1979 six letter bombs were defuzed and nine exploded in the Birmingham postal system. Each device contained an electronic arming circuit similar to the long-delay timers. They had been assembled in Ireland, brought over and posted in Birmingham. After forensic evaluation of the defuzed devices, a warrant was issued for Magee’s arrest.

  Magee fled to Holland but, in September 1980, after being alerted by their British counterparts, the Dutch police arrested him. Three months later a Dutch court refused to extradite him to Britain, released him, and he returned to Ireland.

  Little was known of his whereabouts until 15 September 1984 when, using a false name and address, Magee checked in to the Grand Hotel, Brighton. He made an advance cash payment of £180 for a three-night stay. He was allocated Room 629, five floors directly above that which Margaret Thatcher would occupy a few weeks later for the annual Conservative Party Conference.

  On the night of 17 September 1984 Magee hid a long-delay electronically timed device containing around 11 kilograms of high explosive behind a bath panel in Room 629. He left the Grand Hotel the following day and, for the next three weeks, other guests continued to use the room and its ensuite bathroom.

  On 8 October the Conservative Party Conference opened. The Grand Hotel was fully booked with high-ranking party officials including the Prime Minister and several Cabinet Ministers.

  Magee’s bomb exploded at 2.54 a.m. on Friday 12 October. It blew apart the bath, tore down the walls and toppled the huge chimney stack from the roof above, sending it crashing down through the floors to the basement below. Five prominent members of the Conservative Party were killed and thirty injured, some permanently disabled.

  I drove to Brighton the day after the bombing. The elegant facade of the Grand Hotel was riven apart, its central section a huge tumble of rubble. Damage and death had been caused not so much by the bomb’s power as its position. The collapse of the hotel’s central flooring area was due entirely to the weight of the chimney crashing through from the roof to ground level.

  Returning to London, I undertook a survey of metropolitan buildings likely to be used by public figures. What emerged was that buildings are designed to cope with downward, not upward, thrusts. You can put tremendous weights on some floors, but apply a tenth of that force in an upward direction and they will break. When that happens, they come crashing down along with their walls. Catastrophic weakening of the structure accompanied by the sudden impact of plunging masonry will not re
duce an entire building to rubble but it can – as in the case of the Grand Hotel – result in severe localized floor-by-floor damage.

  Aware now of the threat implicit in building design, particularly that of some older structures, I was dismayed by the evidence of my survey. Unfortunately, identifying a risk is one thing, dealing with it, quite another. To even attempt to rectify design flaws in some of the buildings surveyed would have cost millions, and most likely have destroyed their character as a result.

  As for discreetly advising, for instance, that a particular hotel should not be used for a Royal function, that was likewise out of the question: word would gradually get out, facts be distorted and rumours amplified, and finally the hotel would be deserted by its clientele and face financial ruin through no fault of its own.

  The survey was filed after completion. We had acquired a great deal of knowledge but would never have the wherewithal to make much use of it.

  Shortly after the Brighton bombing the IRA issued a statement admitting responsibility and adding: ‘Today we were unlucky. But remember – we only have to be lucky once.’

  Sussex police set about the mammoth task of tracing all guests in the preceding month. They managed to eliminate 800 people in fifty countries including two sets of American tourists and an Indian visitor from Bombay. Eventually they were left with the signatory to the Room 629 registration card of 15 September.

  In the meantime, 3,798 dustbins containing evidence from the explosion together with a further 46,000 pounds of debris were loaded on to trucks and delivered to the Forensic Explosives Laboratory. Forensic analysis subsequently confirmed that the device had featured components consistent with a long-delay timer as well as two PP9 batteries – needed to power long-delay timers.

  Analysis of the Grand Hotel registration card revealed prints from a left little finger and a right palm. In January 1985 a crossmatch was made with the prints taken from Patrick Joseph Magee by the Norwich police in 1966. The false name was also identified: Magee had signed himself in under the name of a friend – a known Provisional – who could not possibly have signed the register as he was serving a life sentence for his role in the London car bomb attacks of March 1973.

  Anti-terrorist chiefs decided not to go public with their knowledge of Magee’s involvement. Instead they waited for him to return to the mainland. Their patience was rewarded less than six months later when, on 15 June 1985, Magee checked in to London’s Rubens Hotel. He used a different false name to sign the registration card for Room 112, which faced on to the Queen’s Picture Gallery in Buckingham Palace. He set a long-delay timer to initiate a 3½-pound bomb on 29 July and then concealed the device behind a fitted bedside cabinet. He left the Rubens Hotel the following day for a safe house in Scotland – the headquarters of what was intended to be the most vicious IRA bombing campaign Britain had ever seen.

  The campaign targeted London as well as twelve British seaside resorts.

  Magee joined the other members of his terrorist group at their flat in Langside Road, Glasgow. On 22 June Peter Sherry, credited by security sources with at least fifteen murders, left his home in Dungannon, Northern Ireland and travelled to the Scottish port of Stranraer. He did not realize he was under twenty-four hour surveillance by the Royal Ulster Constabulary.

  At 7.40 p.m. on 22 June detectives burst into the Glasgow apartment and arrested the five occupants: Patrick Magee, Peter Sherry, Gerald McDonnell, Ella O’Dwyer and Martina Anderson. They found a number of fake passports, handguns and wigs, £20,000 in cash and a log setting out the schedule for the summer bombing campaign: sixteen bombs were intended to explode in daily succession in London and the twelve seaside resorts. According to the schedule, one of the bombs was already in place in Room 112 of the Rubens Hotel, London.

  Detailed information about the bomb and its location was sent through to us on the morning of 23 June. One of my colleagues was immediately tasked to the scene. Only when I arrived for the start of my duty shift did I learn what was happening: an Expo was at the hotel and undertaking the search procedure.

  This was very unusual; Explosives Officers do not normally get called in until after a search has been completed and a find made. On this occasion, however, the detailed information received from Scotland indicated that this was a high-risk operation: a bomb was in Room 112 and was very likely to be booby-trapped.

  My duty shift was to follow on from the Expo at the Rubens, so I hastened to the hotel. The device had at last been located by the Expo’s driver. It had been so securely hidden that had there not been a ninety-nine per cent certainty of its existence, it could well have evaded detection.

  My colleague and I stared at the package. It had been hidden in the void at the base of the bedside cabinet. X-rays revealed the presence of two anti-handler mechanisms: a mercury-tilt switch and a microswitch. The long-delay timer had been set, the timer to arm the bomb had closed and the arming obviously completed some time ago. If the device had been moved even a fraction of an inch, it would have exploded. Accordingly, we decided to use the disrupter.

  We positioned it with great care, moving as much furniture out of the way as possible to permit the greatest accuracy of aim. We ran the firing cable out of the window, down on to Buckingham Palace Road below, and along to a shop doorway where the four of us gathered together in a tight huddle: my colleague and myself and our two police drivers.

  The firing cable was connected to a device which generates an electric current to fire the disrupter. My colleague grinned at me. ‘Go on. You do it.’

  I shook my head. ‘Thanks, but your driver found the bomb. He should have the honour of pressing the button.’

  ‘Whoa,’ said the driver. ‘Not me.’

  ‘Look,’ I said. ‘How often does a police constable have the chance to blow up a London hotel and not get blamed for it?’

  He considered for only a moment. ‘Ah well, when you put it like that.’ And he fired the disrupter.

  The Rubens did not blow up. The disrupter worked perfectly, blasting the device’s internal circuitry to smithereens. We went back into Room 112 to survey the various fragments and pieces of explosive that had erupted outwards under the force of the ultra-high-velocity water jet. We were looking at the last bomb of the man who tried to kill the British Prime Minister.

  On 10 June 1986 Peter Sherry, aged thirty, Gerald McDonnell, thirty-five, Ella O’Dwyer, twenty-six, and Martina Anderson, twenty-three, were sentenced to life imprisonment for their conspiracy to cause explosions in the summer holiday season of 1985.

  Patrick Joseph Magee, thirty-five, was convicted of the murders of the five victims of the Grand Hotel bombing and of conspiring to cause explosions in the summer campaign. He was given eight life sentences and the judge recommended he should serve not less than thirty-five years. If Magee serves the minimum term, he will be released when he is seventy years old. The year will be 2021.

  10

  Terror from the Middle East

  The attempted bombing of an El Al flight by Nezar Nawaf Mansour Hindawi was the first example of State terrorism to be proved in a UK Court. A Jordanian national, Hindawi was born in 1954. Though his mother and sisters continued to live in Jordan, Hindawi’s father and one of his brothers took up permanent residence in the UK. Hindawi came to England in 1980 to visit his brother. He enrolled on a succession of English language courses and became the London correspondent for a number of Arab journals. In December 1980 he married a Polish national also living in London; the couple separated not long afterwards.

  In late 1984 Hindawi was introduced by a mutual friend to thirty-year-old Ann Murphy. Dublin-born and bred, she arrived in London in October of that year and found work as a hotel chambermaid. Hindawi left London at Christmas 1984 and reappeared at Murphy’s staff quarters two months later, when she informed him she had recently had a miscarriage. Hindawi proposed to her, saying he was divorcing his wife. Bizarrely, he also asked if she could put him in touch with the Provisional IRA for
the purposes of ‘a journalistic interview’. Murphy had no idea what he was talking about and Hindawi vanished again, reappearing briefly before leaving for an undisclosed overseas destination in November. This latest departure occurred shortly after Murphy revealed that she was pregnant again.

  On 7 April 1986 Hindawi suddenly materialized on Murphy’s doorstep. He had missed her, he said, and to make up for his behaviour would like to take her on a holiday to Israel where they would be married. He gave her the telephone and room number of his London hotel.

  On 14 April Hindawi told her they would have to travel separately; she could go direct but he had first to go to Jordan on a ticket prepurchased by his employer. He would meet her a few hours after her arrival in Tel Aviv. Ann Murphy did not relish the prospect of travelling alone but Hindawi told her that if she didn’t agree then she needn’t bother going at all. She had to comply.

  On 16 April Hindawi presented Murphy with a large holdall, ‘a bag with wheels’ as he described it. It would, he said, be far better for her than her existing suitcases. They talked for a while about the next day’s travel arrangements, during which time Hindawi kept fiddling with a pocket calculator. He then packed her clothes – and the calculator – into the holdall and left.

  At 7.20 a.m. on Thursday 17 April 1986 Hindawi returned in a taxi and the couple then travelled to Heathrow Airport. Although he was supposed to be flying to Jordan at the same time, his absence of luggage aroused no suspicion in Ann Murphy’s mind. Unused to international travel and very much in love with her husband-to-be, Murphy had no idea of Hindawi’s private plans for her, her unborn child, and the other 374 passengers and crew of the El Al flight to Tel Aviv.

  En route to Heathrow Hindawi opened Murphy’s luggage and removed the calculator. He inserted a battery, then returned the calculator to the holdall, this time delving deep to ensure it was placed at the bottom of the holdall. Murphy did not ask why he was so preoccupied with the calculator.