Blood and Rage_ A Cultural History of Terrorism - Michael Burleigh [210]
While these shifts were happening in the political landscape, a sequence of events occurred that took violence to a new nadir. During the autumn of 1987 British intelligence officers monitored the movements of a Provo active service unit as it moved back and forth between Belfast and Malaga in southern Spain. It gradually became apparent that the PIRA team were bent on driving an enormous car bomb from the Spanish mainland so as to bomb the Royal Anglian Regiment at the Changing of the Guard ceremony in Gibraltar. This was scheduled to take place on 8 March. SAS teams were despatched to join a host of intelligence personnel already present. Their orders specified that they were allowed to fire without warning if a shout might lead to death or injury of a comrade or a bystander. On 4 March 1988 Mairéad Farrell, a thirty-one-year-old former PIRA prisoner, flew in from Brussels, while Sean Savage, aged twenty-three, and Danny McCann, thirty, arrived from Paris. Savage and McCann had assassinated two Special Branch officers in Belfast Docks in August 1987. They hired two Fiesta cars, and used one of them to move 140 pounds of explosives which were then put into the other; this second Fiesta was left in a Marbella car park. They rented a white Renault, and parked it near where the ceremony was to be held, the idea being to replace it with the white Fiesta carrying the bomb so that nobody would notice. Next, Farrell and McCann drove to the border, and then walked over on foot; Savage drove the white Renault. The three wandered around and then walked back along Winston Churchill Avenue to the border. They loitered chatting at a petrol station and then split up to leave. McCann found himself temporarily smiling into a face that did not smile back. Realising his mistake, McCann brought his right arm up suddenly, and was shot by a man in jeans and T-shirt. Farrell went for something in her shoulder bag, and was shot too. Savage was confronted by two SAS men. As he went into combat mode, one soldier fired nine rounds into him; two to the head and seven into his chest as he was trained to do. The soldiers concerned were whisked away from the scene; the British public rejoiced.
Republican supporters turned out in numbers to the funerals of these three in Belfast’s Milltown cemetery ten days later. Pandemonium broke out when a UFF gunman, Michael Stone, ran amok hurling grenades and firing at the mourners with a pistol. Before he was rescued by police from a furious mob bent on killing him, Stone had murdered two civilians in their twenties and an older PIRA member called Caoimhin MacBradaigh. His targets had been Adams and McGuinness, in revenge for Enniskillen.
Three days later, republicans gathered to bury Caoimhin MacBradaigh in the same cemetery. A VW Passat suddenly hove into view, leading many of the mourners to think they were under another loyalist attack. As it happened, the two men in the car were off-duty army signals men, one of whom was showing his colleague his first republican funeral. When the car was trapped by an angry mob, one of the soldiers fired a warning shot from his Browning pistol. Any undercover ‘Det’, FRU or SAS trooper would have shot someone to clear an escape route. The mourners and PIRA stewards dragged the men out of the car. They were assaulted and bundled into