Gerry Adams ’set up ambush of IRA gang’ - shock files reveal
IRISH republican leader Gerry Adams was rumoured to have “set up” an IRA gang who were ambushed by the SAS as they tried to blow up a police station in May 1987, files released today in Dublin reveal.
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Eight members of the Provisional’s East Tyrone Brigade were shot dead after they loaded a 200lb bomb on a stolen digger and smashed through the gates of RUC barracks in Loughgall, Co Armagh.
Army special forces were lying in wait and killed them all, along with innocent bystander Anthony Hughes.
The files reveal that ballistic tests on weapons found on the dead were used in up to 50 murders, including every Republican killing in Fermanagh and Tyrone in 1987.
Three civilian contractors had been murdered in the two counties that year along with officers in the RUC and the Army’s Ulster Defence Regiment.
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The rumour about Mr Adams’s involvement in the ambush was passed on to Ireland’s Department of Foreign Affairs by respected cleric Father Denis Faul three months after the Loughgall operation.
The priest, who had been at school in St Patrick’s Academy, Dungannon with Padraig McKearney, one of the IRA gang, said the theory doing the rounds was that “the IRA team were set up by Gerry Adams himself”.
Mr Adams declined to comment on the contents of the file when contacted.
Father Faul, a school teacher and chaplain in Long Kesh prison, said the rumour was that two of the gang – Jim Lynagh, a councillor in Monaghan, and McKearney – “had threatened to execute Adams shortly before the Loughgall event”.
It was being claimed that Lynagh and McKearney “disliked Adams’s political policy” and that they were leaning towards Republican Sinn Fein.
Three days after the operation, Irish foreign minister Brian Lenihan wrote to Northern Ireland secretary Tom King urging him not to be triumphant over the killings.
“It is necessary that sensitivity be shown in regard to the funerals which are now taking place and that the investigation of the events should pay particular attention to the question of whether such a large number of casualties, including the civilian casualty, could have been avoided.”
Mr King wrote back over a week later and revealed: “My advice is that that group had at least 40 to 50 murders to their score.”
