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Sudden death and the long quest for answers THE GIBRALTAR SHOOTINGS Heather Mills retraces events on the Rock and analyses the doubts that remain HEATHER MILLS Thursday 28 September 1995 0 PRINT A A A The gunning down of three unarmed IRA terrorists on the streets of Gibraltar by the SAS has continued to haunt the British government. The March 1988 killings led to a cycle of death in Northern Ireland, re- opened claims that the government operated a “shoot-to kill“ policy and called into question the reputation of British justice. And yesterday British justice was found wanting when the European Court of Human Rights decided that Mairead Farrell, Sean Savage and Daniel McCann had been unnecessarily killed. For the families who have fought for seven years to uncover the truth behind death on the Rock, it was, as they claimed, “proof the government had blood on its hands“. Events leading to yesterday's political fall-out started a few months before the bloodshed in Gibraltar, when the IRA began plotting a massive bomb attack on the colony's changing of the guard ceremony. Unknown to the bombers, dispatched to Spain from where they were to launch the attack, British security services were on to them. When three members of the team crossed Gibraltar's border with Spain for what turned out to be a reconnaissance trip, the SAS were on the colony, waiting. The British authorities have maintained the trio actually slipped into the Rock unnoticed that Sunday morning but were picked up by MI5 surveillance experts and Gibraltar police. They say Savage drove a car, which they believed contained a bomb, while Farrell and McCann crossed the border on foot. That remains to this day one of the most hotly contested pieces of evidence in the case. But what is undeniable is that just before four that afternoon - just two or three minutes after SAS soldiers took control from the Gibraltar authorities - all three terrorists were brought down in a hail of 29 bullets, 16 pumped into Savage alone. A police siren sounded, and two soldiers leaped over a barrier as Farrell and McCann lay dying in the road leading to the Spanish border. A few seconds later and another volley of shots brought down Savage as he headed up an alleyway back towards the town. Briefly, the government's account that the SAS had thwarted the trio's plans to devastate the colony with a large car bomb went largely unchallenged. But it soon emerged that although they were clearly bent on carnage at the time of the shootings, the trio were unarmed and there was no bomb. The planned attack was for two days later on 8 March and the explosives were later found in Spain.
