After the bomb had gone off Gormley and O’Callaghan tried to run away. Gormley, carrying the zippo lighter but no weapon, was shot dead after emerging from behind a wall where he had taken cover. O’Callaghan, carrying an assault rifle, was killed as he ran across the road from the station.
There were later claims that the SAS fired more than 1200 rounds at the IRA men. It is hard to know the exact figure but it was certainly some hundreds. Many of the holes in the wooden fence opposite could still be seen when I visited the area in 1989. The bullet numbers, chalked by CID Scene of Crime Officers after the incident, from 184 to 192, were still visible.
An SAS man later joked to colleagues that he had tap-danced as he used the General Purpose Machine Gun. The angle of the bullet marks in the fence and those in the side of the van suggests that most of the bullets fired in this area came from an area around the entrance to the RUC station.
Concentrating relatively heavy firepower in the village carried risks for the SAS. They were using powerful weapons across open ground and four cars being driven by people uninvolved with terrorism were caught in the ambush area. The group in the copse fired many rounds across the lower ground, where the RUC station and football field are, into the main part of the village. The IRA men had also opened fire. An SAS man recalls, ‘the bad guys were shooting all around, panicking like hell.’ Bullets smacked into the wall of the church hall, where children were playing. Three cars were in the area between the RUC station and the church.
Oliver and Anthony Hughes, brothers from another village, were driving their white Citroën past the church and down the hill towards the RUC station. Oliver Hughes said later, ‘We heard the bang and Anthony stopped the car, not wanting to drive into the troubled area. We decided to reverse away from the scene.’ Soldiers hiding nearby probably thought that the reversing vehicle also belonged to the terrorists and they opened fire.
‘The car hadn’t moved far before the firing started,’ Oliver Hughes continued. ‘The shots were deafening, blazing away behind us and lots of them hitting the road. The back of the car must have been hit. There were terrible fumes so I began to wind down the window for air. Then there was a crash of glass and I heard Anthony let a bit of a shout out of him. I didn’t even have time to turn round to see him when I was hit myself.’
Anthony Hughes, a thirty-six-year-old father of three, was killed. His brother survived, despite having been hit at least four times – three rounds went into his back and one into his head. It appeared that the SAS men had poured fire into the car without issuing any challenge or knowing who was in it. The soldiers’ explanation was that the brothers had been wearing overalls, as were the IRA terrorists, and appeared to be about to open fire.
Another vehicle, containing a woman and her young daughter, was going the other way, up the hill towards the church. As bullets began hitting the car, the commander of one of the SAS stop groups rushed over to the vehicle to rescue her. The soldier was awarded the Military Medal for this act of valour.
An elderly couple were in the third vehicle caught in this area. Herbert Buckley and his wife jumped out of their car and threw themselves in a ditch.
On the other side of the RUC station, between the IRA men’s Toyota and the copse where the SAS assault group had opened fire, another motorist had stopped his car. The man, a salesman for a brewery, apparently watched transfixed as hundreds of SAS bullets hit the van just ahead of him. As the firing stopped he jumped out of the car and ran towards the bungalows beside the road. He was rugby tackled by an SAS man and held until his identity could be established.
As the shooting subsided the area was sealed off by armed police. Helicopters flew over as troops scoured the countryside in case other terrorists were in the area. Within half an hour the first SAS troops were on their way out of the area by helicopter. The IRA had lost eight men, its worst single setback in sixty years. Tom King, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, told an RUC passing out parade, ‘If people do launch terrorist acts, they must recognize they have to face the consequences.’
The funerals of the Loughgall eight became the platform for threats of revenge. Sinn Fein’s Gerry Adams said, ‘Loughgall will become a tombstone for British policy in Ireland and a bloody milestone in the struggle for freedom, justice and peace.’ Ten months after the Loughgall incident an IRA team was sent to attack a British military band in Gibraltar, but this unit too was intercepted and killed by SAS soldiers.
In allowing the heavily armed IRA unit to enter the village and set the bomb off, the covert operators had achieved, in their terms, the ultimate ‘clean kill’. One of Gerry Adams’ first reactions was, ‘I believe that the IRA volunteers would understand the risk they were taking,’ which implied that the operation would be regarded as ‘fair’, even by many in the republican community.
The IRA later said that some members of its team had survived. It claimed furthermore that they had witnessed the SAS men summarily executing the eight men. It is quite possible that there were others in the general area who survived – both the numbers involved in The Birches attack and the fact that the SAS group opened fire on the Hughes’ car suggest that the soldiers’ briefing indicated there were others around – but any surviving member of
