The CID detective chief inspector charged with carrying out the official investigation of the Gransha shootings told the inquest, ‘I can’t say what information was available to the forces prior to this incident.’ This issue, of exactly what they did and did not know, is crucial in forming a judgement about the ethics of how the IRA men met their deaths. Were it to emerge in a court, for example, that they had been followed from their homes, or from the cache where they picked up their weapons, to the place where they intended to kill, then serious questions would have been raised about whether the SAS soldiers had used reasonable and necessary force. It might, for example, have been possible to have ‘jarked’ of ‘fixed’ their guns previously and have captured the IRA men as they picked up the weapons.
Soldier F, the officer who had briefed the soldiers at Gransha, told the court, ‘I had no specific information.’ Yet a person who has reviewed the case claims the soldiers had the ‘perfect tip-off’. His suggestion that they knew exactly who the IRA men’s target was – and even put a soldier on the bus to protect him – never emerged during the court proceedings. Soldier F did admit it would have been better ‘with hindsight’ to have called in the police to have made arrests when the motorcycle was seen in the hospital grounds. This was reflected in the jury’s finding at the end of the inquest, when they said the Army should have called in the police. But the overwhelming likelihood that the operation could not have happened without the knowledge of the Special Branch – through the TCG, part of the police – was not examined in court. Whatever its limits, the Gransha finding was the closest a coroner’s court has come in recent years to censuring Army special forces for their role in such a shooting.
The Strabane inquest focused on a different part of the ‘shoot-to-kill’ conundrum: not on whether there was an alternative to the confrontation but on how the soldiers had behaved during it. This is not promising ground for those seeking to question the soldiers’ behaviour. It had been shown in the Boyle case that even if SAS men end up charged with murder it is very difficult to prove to a court that their version of why they opened fire is untrue, however implausible it might sound. Much of the questioning at Strabane centred on the question of whether the IRA men had been given a coup de grâce as they pleaded for mercy.
Police witnesses said that the cries of ‘Don’t shoot, don’t shoot’ had come not from injured Provisionals but from a frightened motorist, when stopped by members of the QRF on the road. However, they were not able to trace the man, saying he had identified himself only as ‘Kelly from Plumbridge’. They said they had not taken his full name or car registration number.
Post-mortem evidence showed that each of the IRA men had at least one shot through the head. Yet their balaclavas contained no bullet holes, leading to suggestions that the soldiers had approached them, lifted off the masks to identify the men and then delivered the fatal shots. The soldiers’ statements admitted that they had taken the balaclavas off the men, but said it was after the firing had stopped. The Crown suggested by way of explanation that the bullets might have entered through the balaclavas’ eye holes.
One aspect of the soldiers’ depositions not raised in court was why two of them had suffered ‘stoppages’ (jamming) of their HK53 rifles. The chances of a weapon jamming are slim, particularly when the gun is of a German design, one chosen for its reliability. The chances of two guns jamming are even more remote. I showed an SAS man copies of Soldier A’s and Soldier C’s written depositions. He said he found it ‘very hard to believe’ that both men had had stoppages and that, given the Regiment’s pride in its exhaustive firearms training, they would admit to having their weapons jam even if it had happened.
There is another possible explanation. As the SAS soldiers approached the terrorists they might have drawn their Browning 9 mm automatic pistols. A pistol is a better weapon for a coup de grâce since it causes less trauma to the target’s body when fired very close and poses less of a risk to the firer through the impact of ricochets. Forensic evidence showed that both soldiers did use their 9 mm pistols, so they had to give some explanation for having done so.
If they had used their Brownings to finish the men off at very close range there would have been other signs. The Provisionals’ clothes might have shown powder burns and 9 mm spent cases would have been found near the bodies. But examination of the clothing was impossible: the RUC had destroyed it. The forensic scientist recovered eighty-three or eighty-four spent cases from the scene. When he realized forty-two were unaccounted for he tried to go back, but was told by the RUC he could not for ‘operational reasons’.
It may be that both HK53s did indeed jam. There may be some other explanation for the use of the 9 mm pistols. In the heat of the moment a soldier may have mistaken an empty magazine for a stoppage and drawn his pistol. But, remarkably, even some leading members of the security forces and of the administration at Stormont believed that the IRA men had been given coups de grâce. One senior figure told me, ‘One thing one couldn’t be sure of after Strabane was whether they were finished off afterwards … there was heavy anecdotal evidence that they were.’
There is another, equally
