Hoax Killing of 3 IRA Members on the Rock of Gibraltar - Fake Death on The Rock

Video Transcript:

The Sun Day Morning on the Costa del Sol and among the holiday makers three Irish terrorists were planning a bloodbath. A white car headed down the coast road driven by an IRA bomber. The destination was Gibraltar, still Britain's vital military adpost at the entrance to the Mediterranean. The IRA have admitted that their plan involved explosives and all evidence suggests that the target was a ceremony that is a symbol of British tradition on the rock and a major tourist attraction. Every Tuesday morning in normal times soldiers and a military band parade in front of the governor general's residence. The ceremony ends round the corner in a side street 100 yards away and it was here at this moment that the IRA apparently planned to set off a massive carbon. Instead three bombers were shot down after carrying out the first stage of their plan, driving in an empty car to secure a parking space as close as possible to their intended victims. In the same street where 140 pounds of high explosive would have detonated, I spoke to a former explosives expert with the British Army. Lieutenant Colonel George Stiles was for three years commander of bomb disposal in Ulster. He says the bomb would have annihilated soldiers and spectators alike. Well we're talking about it in seconds but in milliseconds the car would disintegrate. The Shrapner could go nowhere and ricochay off the walls of the building opposite in the war behind. But above all that you've got a tremendous concentration of blast because of the building so close together and the smallness of the area and so forth and in the middle of all that you've got people. And what would have been the effect on these people the band principally of the Royal Angling Regiment? They wouldn't survive. People are fragmental. They can be torn apart as they are torn apart by the effects of concentrated blast. I think anybody in this area would not survive. After NSKL in the provisional's political leadership expressed regret but in fact the IRA was already planning the Gibraltar outrage. She had recently been released after serving more than 10 years in prison for planting bombs in a bell faster tell and actually committed at the age of 19. In the same tape she said she was lucky the police didn't shoot her when they found her outside the hotel. In prison Farrell led the women's dirty protest smearing excrement on the walls of their cells. After her release she re-entered the IRA's military structure in a special unit attached to the general headquarters staff. In the same team were Sean Savage a committed terrorist known for his bomb-making skills. And Danny McCann known to British intelligence as one of the IRA's most dangerous killers who chose to shoot his victims at point blank range. Last year McCann was photographed with a cross that he claimed British soldiers had delivered to his door in Belfast. These were the three terrorists who came back dead from Gibraltar. It's now clear that their unit's mission was to strike a major blow to revive IRA morale. It was on November 5th last year four months before the shooting that the IRA operation in southern Spain got underway arriving at Mallaca Airport a member of their special headquarters unit. The terrorists who mingled with the other passengers was Daniel McCann the gunman from Belfast carrying a false-arish passport in the name of Riley. As he went through passport control he appeared to slip through routinely but in reality Spanish security police were already watching for him. It turned out that McCann's destination was Torre Melinos. In fact the first tip off that helped to locate the Irish terrorists here on the Costa del Sol came from London and told that the Spanish police had received a message from the British authorities warning them that an IRA group could be trying to operate on Spanish soil. Details of thousands of tourists were sifted by police computers which checked hotel registration cards against lists of known false documents and names. By mid-Devonber they had pinpointed three terrorists. Daniel McCann, Sean Savage and another woman terrorist whom police in both Britain and Spain still refused a name. The fourth member of the IRA unit she traveled under the false name of Mary Parking. Sunday morning March 6th a car her firm in Marbella just five hours before the shootings. Marad Farrell walked in and gave a cash deposit to hire a car in the false name of Catherine Smith. A few minutes later she drove the white Ford Fiesta into an underground car park in the center of Marbella. She drove it down to the lower level which is deserted on a Sunday morning. Police are working on the theory that the red car containing the explosives was already parked here and that Marad Farrell now transferred them to the white car which had been hired with a fresh passport in a new name. 140 pounds of explosives were found in the white Ford Fiesta in the car park two days after the shootings. I'm told that until then neither the Spanish nor British police had any idea they were here. On the final Sunday of the operation it was this vital question of where the explosives were hidden that came to obsess security officials in both Spain and Gibraltar. The IRA team then set out for Gibraltar in two separate cars both under surveillance. Telling them plain clothes officers of Spain's elite anti-terrorist squad. The first IRA car was a white Renault 5 driven by Sean Savage. Later police reported the red Ford with Farrell and McCann. The eyes of the Spanish police they're two cars met up and then Savage drove off in the white Renault leaving the red Ford and the other two terrorists behind in Spain. Just before 1 pm Savage drove into the border checkpoint and the Spanish police allowed him to pass through. On the Gibraltar side British security officials took over the surveillance and they too allowed Savage's car to drive through unhindered. Just why British security men did not stop a car that only two hours later came under suspicion as a dangerous car bomb is one of the key questions in the Gibraltar affair. And the biggest question as the car crossed the airfield towards the time of Gibraltar is how much was known about what the white Renault actually contained. According to the Spanish security police they thought it was possible that the car contained a bomb but they were also working on the theory that the explosives had already been delivered to Gibraltar by sea and that the car was now going to pick them up. Instead Savage drove on apparently unaware that nearby British troops including SAS men were lying in wait. Under surveillance he drove into the street where the Tuesday parade ends and parked his car beside the ancient city wall. Back at the border at around 230 that afternoon the other two members of the IRA team crossed into Gibraltar on foot and then at around half past three they all left the area on foot leaving the parked white Renault behind them unattended. At around 330 the terrorists began to walk back towards the border. It's now believed that the next phase in their plan would have been to bring in the real car bomb. They would then have put it in their parking space in time for the parade on Tuesday. They left the old town and were more than a mile from the parked car when Farrell and McCann, a hundred yards in front of Savage, reached a petrol station which was closed on Sunday. Then suddenly a burst of shots rang out and in less than a minute all three terrorists were dead shot by the SAS. We have interviewed four key witnesses to the shootings. Their accounts raise serious questions about what really happened that afternoon for they say that the British soldiers open fire without warning and none of them saw the IRA bombers make any threatening movements. The first witness is a housewife, Josie Celicia, whose flat is on the second floor opposite the petrol station. Well I saw these two couples and I was telling the men because they had spiky, blonde, short hair I know. Then all of a sudden I took my side of them and looked to be out there a venture program. Suddenly I heard two shots, they were about two shots. So I was just looking from where that came from. All of a sudden I saw the woman, you know, the couple in the floor. They didn't do anything, they just jumped with the hands in their hands and they just one done shot these people, that's all. They didn't say anything, they didn't scream, they didn't shout, they didn't do anything. These people were telling their heads back to see what was happening and when they saw this man had the guns in their hand, they just put their hands up. It looked like the man was protecting the girl because he stood in front of her but there was no chance. I mean they went to the floor immediately, they dropped. Outside the petrol station I saw a man who I'm fairly sure was wearing a bright yellow short sleeve shirt standing with both hands out stretched, holding a gun like this and firing very rapidly into another man with blonde hair wearing a white shirt who was falling backwards with his hands like this and falling back almost in slow motion. He went right down and the firing continued, he was still being shot at as he went down. And the moment these shots were being fired into him, how close were the two men together? About as far as I am from you, say four feet. Really close range? Oh yes, yes, undoubtedly. I mean close enough, let's put it this way, I think with one step he could have actually touched the person he was shooting. Looking from her window, Josie Celicia saw the terrorists on the ground and an SAS man still pointing his pistol at them. As you saw the two lying on the ground and another man standing about what happened? I heard shots, about four or five shots. More shots? See? What were they lying? Continuously. The automatic fire, no? The automatic fire, that? One after the other.