Local people were to claim that they had heard cries of ‘Don’t shoot, don’t shoot’ from one of the injured Provisionals. The question of whether the SAS finished the men with a coup de grâce as they lay injured on the ground was to emerge as one of the most controversial aspects of the incident. Many extraordinary allegations emerged from the estate – for example, that other soldiers had opened fire with a machine-gun from a cemetery several hundred metres away. This was not borne out by any of the forensic evidence and was denied by soldiers and police.
Immediately after the shooting, soldiers and RUC officers from the QRF broke into a house, searching for other terrorists. This suggests they probably knew there were more than three men in the original ambush party. Crossan was arrested; he subsequently confessed to several terrorist crimes, and in 1986 was sentenced to twenty years in jail. The judge, referring to the fate of Breslin and the Devines, said that Crossan was lucky to be alive and that, ‘They that take up the sword perish by the sword.’ The fifth member of the ambush team has never been charged with involvement in the plan.
Shortly after the Strabane killings, the IRA began a hunt for the source of the leak which had led the men to their deaths. Two days later Kevin Coyle, a twenty-four-year-old republican was found dead in Londonderry’s Bogside. The IRA said he had been an informer for some time, but the police denied it. Some people linked his killing with the Strabane incident, though not the IRA itself. In October of the same year Damien McCrory, a twenty-year-old Strabane Provisional, was found shot dead. The IRA said he had been a traitor who, like the Mahon couple – killed in Belfast a few weeks before – had been given tracking devices to insert in weapons. The IRA said that some people had come forward as a result of the Mahons’ deaths but that, ‘Where we are forced to hunt down touts, they must expect no mercy.’
Many questions remained unanswered after the Strabane incident. Some were to emerge at the inquest held from 3 February to 22 April 1987. It was to be the fullest inquiry of its kind held until then, but, despite this, it produced claims of cover-up and whitewash from many nationalists.
Loyalists did not, on the whole, object to the soldiers’ behaviour. Sammy Wilson, a Democratic Unionist on Belfast Council, said after the Strabane shootings, ‘Talking, reason or persuasion does not work with the IRA so the only answer is to shoot its members; this at least ensures that they will not be available to carry out any more murders of Protestants.’ But while Wilson and the DUP may have their fingers on the pulse of opinion in the working-class Protestant enclaves – and therefore of some elements within the UDR and RUC – there were other Unionists who saw things differently. Enoch Powell, official Unionist MP for south Down from 1974 to 1987, challenged the idea that it was legitimate to exploit foreknowledge to catch armed terrorists in ambushes. ‘I am astonished that the proposition should be put forward that because a person is suspected of preparing to commit a crime, therefore he should be shot without trial’, he was to say after the Gibraltar incident.
The Strabane inquest was extensive because the solicitors representing the families understood the importance of the issues and the need to call many witnesses: In many other cases there was only the most perfunctory hearing. Oistin MacBride, brother of Tony, who was killed in the Kesh incident, remembered that his family ‘were so naïve at the time’. He says the RUC had told them the proceedings were a ‘formality’ and the inquest, at which the MacBrides had no legal representation, was completed in three hours. Some of the inquests have been little more than minor skirmishes between country solicitors, who usually agree to represent the families for free (since there is no legal aid for inquest proceedings) but who have no real experience of such matters, and anonymous security forces witnesses.
Interviews with members of the security forces who have been involved in such incidents, or who have had access to information about them, reveal in many cases a version of events which is significantly different from that presented in court. The concoction of cover stories designed to protect informers and disguise the degree of foreknowledge of a crime had been exposed by the Stalker inquiry. The stories given to courts about incidents involving Army special forces in the period 1983 to 1985 also appear, from the evidence of interviews conducted for this book, to be designed to disguise the amount which SB and Army intelligence officers really knew before an incident. In effect they are designed to preserve not only the sources of that intelligence but also the myth of the ‘clean kill’ – that IRA members lost their lives because they were encountered, armed and in the middle of an operation, when the security forces had no choice but to engage them.
The inquest into the shooting of Doherty and Fleming at the Gransha hospital showed some of the problems of trying to establish the truth in such cases. Throughout the proceedings the Army maintained that the presence of the soldiers in the hospital grounds was in some sense ‘routine’ or part of normal security duties. But committing around ten SAS men – just under half of the total resident SAS contingent in Ulster – in a small area of one city cannot,
