Terror Attacks

by Ann Williams

  Anne Morrison

  The bombing of a coach carrying British army soldiers and their families from Manchester to an army base in Catterick, North Yorkshire, was just one atrocity in a long campaign of bombings mounted by the terrorist Irish Republican Army (IRA) on mainland Britain during the 1970s. Eleven people died in the coach bomb blast, including two young children; 12 more were seriously injured. Later in the same year, the IRA began to plant bombs in pubs, in Guildford and Birmingham, killing 26 people and injuring many more. In all these cases, the wrong people were jailed for the murders, in a series of high-level miscarriages of justice that did little to enhance the reputation of the police and judiciary in Britain. In the case of the coach bomb, the woman jailed for the crime was Judith Ward, a woman with a history of mental illness who served 18 years in prison before eventually being released. During the investigation, it became clear that police had cobbled together a story from the garbled evidence she gave, so that they could secure a conviction for the crime. Thus, the M62 coach bombing, and the attacks that followed it, were not only disasters for the victims involved, and for the security of the British public in general; in the aftermath of the events, the way they were handled in the courts also turned out to be indictments of the British justice system.

  TWISTED METAL

  In the early hours of Monday, February 4, 1974, a coach was travelling up the M62 motorway between Gomersal and Birkenshaw. It had come from Manchester, and was on its way to a British army base at Catterick, in North Yorkshire, and to an RAF base near Darlington. The coach was full of soldiers and their families, who had been taking a weekend break together. Normally, soldiers with 48-hour passes would have taken trains, but at the time, there was widespread industrial unrest, and many railway workers were on strike, so the trains were not running properly. Thus the soldiers had come to rely on the coach rather than the rail services to get them back to their stations on time, and special coaches had been commissioned to take soldiers out on their weekend leave and run them back again to their bases on Sunday night.

  As the coach sped along the motorway south of Leeds, near Bradford and Drightlington, there was a massive explosion. It was just past midnight. The sound of the blast was carried for several kilometres, and the blast itself left the coach a tangle of twisted metal. Bodies were strewn along the motorway, in some cases blasted 228 metres (250 yards) away. Police and army bomb disposal experts were immediately called to the scene, but in the pitch-black darkness, it was difficult initially to work out what exactly had happened. In their first public statements, West Yorkshire police only commented: ‘We are treating this with an open mind. It could have been the work of terrorists.’

  YOUNG FAMILY DEAD

  As daylight dawned, it became clear what had happened. Out of a coach load of more than 50 people, 11 people were dead. Tragically, in one instance an entire young family had lost their lives: Lance Corporal Clifford Houghton, his wife Linda, both aged only 23, and their two sons Lee and Robert, aged five and three. In addition, 12 people had been taken to hospital with serious injuries, including a six-year-old boy who had suffered severe burns. Many more of the passengers had sustained minor injuries.

  A memorial service for the victims was held shortly after the bombing, led by the chaplain of the First Battalion King’s Regiment. Linda Houghton’s sister, Anne Morrison, spoke of her loss, saying, ‘We’ve come to terms with it, but we’ll never ever forgive, and never ever forget. It will be with me to the day I die, that morning.’

  MISCARRIAGE OF JUSTICE

  When news of the atrocity was reported, with horrifying pictures showing the extent of the damage, the public were outraged. The attack was condemned by all the major political parties, and the government vowed to bring the perpetrators to justice as soon as possible. Naturally enough, given this pressure, the police were extremely keen to make an arrest, but in their haste to find a culprit for the atrocity, they initiated a terrible miscarriage of justice that later came back to haunt them.

  Judith Ward, a 25-year-old woman from Stockport, voluntarily confessed to the crime, and to two other IRA bombings: the bombing of Euston station, London, in September 1973; and the bombing of the National Defence College in Buckinghamshire on February 12, 1974. What the court was not told was that Ward had changed her ‘confession’ repeatedly, and that parts of it were so confused that the police and the prosecution had to select sections from it so that it made sense.

  Moreover, the forensic evidence that was available for the case was faulty.

  FALSE FORENSIC EVIDENCE

  Ward had apparently been found to have traces of nitroglycerine on her hands, on her bag and in the caravan where she was living. These traces had been picked up using tests, such as the Greiss test, which have since been discredited. The Greiss test is a chemical analysis that shows whether organic nitrites are present on the surface of an item. However, since it also shows the presence of nitrates that are found in ordinary household cleaners, it often gives false positive results. In addition, the forensic scientists working on the case did not give impartial evidence, exaggerating some features of their findings, and they withheld information about other aspects of the case.

  In retrospect, Judith Ward appears to have been used as a convenient scapegoat for IRA crimes that the police were unable to solve. Her history revealed her to be a woman who suffered from mental illness and who had led an unstable life. As a young adult, she had worked as a horse-riding instructor in Dundalk, Ireland, and she had then joined the Women’s Royal Army Corps. However, she went absent without leave from the army, and she was later discharged after claiming that the IRA had tried to recruit her. She then broke into the British army headquarters in Northern Ireland, but was not charged. In the years leading up to the bombing, she had had a variety of jobs, including working as a chambermaid in London and travelling with Chipperfield Circus. While in custody for the bombings, she made a suicide attempt, which was not reported to the court.

  IMPROBABLE CONFESSION

  The prosecution barrister in the case, John Cobb QC, alleged that Ward had joined the army under instructions from the IRA, so that she could pass information to them that would help them select targets for their bombings. This information had led to several attacks, and to the deaths of at least six people. For the defence, Ward’s solicitor Andrew Rankin QC said that there were many anomalies in her confession, and that much of it seemed highly improbable. Ward’s family maintained that she was innocent and had never been a member of the IRA. According to her brother Tommy, much of the testimony she gave, such as the information that she had been married to an IRA Provo and had borne a child by another IRA man, was ‘romancing’.

  Nevertheless, Judith Ward was jailed for life at Wakefield Crown Court in 1974, and went on to serve 18 years of her sentence. Then, on May 11, 1992, her conviction was declared unsafe by a Court of Appeal. The three Appeal Court judges in the case stated that there had been a ‘grave miscarriage of justice’: the jury in the trial should have been told of Ward’s history of mental illness. Moreover, forensic scientists had withheld evidence in the case that could have led to a different outcome. The judges declared that Ward’s conviction had been ‘secured by ambush’, and went on to free her.

  After her release, Ward wrote an autobiography entitled Ambushed, which was published in 1992. She also began to study criminology and campaigned for prisoners’ rights.

  ANTITERROR LAWS

  As well as the M62 coach bomb case, there were other important miscarriages of justice that took place in the 1970s as a result of the police and judiciary’s haste to find scapegoats for what were, of course, appalling terror attacks. In 1974, the IRA mounted a series of horrific pub bombings, resulting in the deaths of five people in Guildford and 21 in Birmingham. Four people were convicted for the Guildford atrocity, and six for the Birmingham attack. After a long campaign, all the convictions in both cases were overturned by the Court of Appeal: the Guildford Four, as they
became known, were released in 1989, followed two years later by the release of the Birmingham Six.

  As well as leading to these miscarriages of justice, the bombings also prompted the government to introduce new antiterrorist laws in Britain. The police gained powers to allow them to hold suspected terrorists for seven days without charge, while the authorities also gained the right to expel individuals from mainland Britain to Northern Ireland or the Republic of Ireland. However, despite these and other measures, the IRA campaign of bombings on the British mainland continued for two more decades, before a lasting ceasefire was declared.

  Cambodia Genocide

  I did not join the resistance movement to kill people, to kill the nation. Look at me now. Am I a savage person? My conscience is clear.

  Pol Pot

  Cambodia is a country in Southeast Asia that was once the centre of the ancient kingdom of Khmer. Its present day capital is Phnom Penh, and in 1953, it gained independence after nearly 100 years of French rule. In April 1975, the Communist forces of the Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot, began a brutal four-year regime in Cambodia, which resulted in the deaths of 25 per cent of the country’s population.

  Cambodia was no stranger to violence; in 1964 the USA entered the Vietnam war, and Cambodia became part of the battlefield. During the following four years, Cambodia lost almost 750,000 civilians when B-52 bombers used napalm and dart cluster-bombs in an effort to destroy suspected North Vietnamese supply lines.

  POL POT AND THE KHMER ROUGE

  The Khmer Rouge were fanatical communists that were determined to create the most perfect form of communism in the world. They were a small guerilla movement, which started in 1970, under the leadership of Pol Pot.

  Pol Pot was born in 1925 and, at the age of 20, travelled to Paris to study electronics. During this time he became obsessed with Marxism and started to neglect his studies. He failed to gain a scholarship and returned to Cambodia in 1953, immediately joining an underground communist movement.

  Shortly after his return, Cambodia gained independence from France and came under the rule of a royal monarch, Prince Sihanouk. By 1962, Pol Pot had become leader of the communist movement and, in order to avoid the wrath of Sihanouk, who did not agree with his politics, he fled into the jungle. Pol Pot formed a new communist movement, which he called the Khmer Rouge (Red Cambodians), and waged a war against the government of Sihanouk. Under the rule of Sihanouk, Cambodia had managed to maintain neutrality in the Vietnamese war by offering favours to both sides, but his prime minister, Lon Nol, did not have the same views as the prince and planned to take over his sovereignty.

  THE MILITARY COUP

  In 1970, Prince Sihanouk was deposed in a military coup that was organized by Lon Nol and the then acting prime minister, Prince Sirik Matak. In early March, Lon Nol organized anti-Vietnam demonstrations across Cambodia and ordered the Vietnamese to leave immediately or they would face an attack. On March 12, thousands of people marched into Phnom Penh, raiding the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong embassies. The next day, Matak cancelled the secret smuggling deals that Sihanouk had set up via the port of Sihanoukville.

  At the time Sihanouk was away in France. When he heard the news he was furious, threatening to have his two ministers arrested. However, instead of returning to Cambodia to sort out the mess, Sihanouk travelled to Moscow and ignored the further actions of the two men. Lon Nol and Sirik Matak managed to convince the National Assembly to remove Sihanouk from power, which had the effect of ending Cambodia’s neutrality. Both the USA and Vietnam were delighted by the change of government and felt that Lon Nol would be a far better man to deal with than his predecessor.

  Sihanouk, however, was not prepared to leave quietly, and he retaliated by joining forces with his former enemy, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. They set about opposing Cambodia’s new military government. In the same year, the USA invaded Cambodia to drive the North Vietnamese out of their border camps. However, their mission failed because, rather than drive them out of Cambodia, they drove them deeper into the country where they allied themselves with the Khmer Rouge.

  SUPPORT FOR POL POT

  Cambodia became the target for US bombing raids from 1969 until 1973, killing more than 150,000 peasants. The peasants fled in panic from the countryside and settled in the capital of Phnom Penh, which resulted in both economic and military destabilization. This was good news for Pol Pot, who was now receiving a lot of support, and by 1975 he had an estimated force of over 700,000 men.

  The USA withdrew their troops from Vietnam in 1975 and Cambodia, which was now plagued by a corrupt government, also lost its American support. Pol Pot and his army took advantage of the situation and marched into Phnom Penh on April 17 and took control of the capital, and effectively the whole of Cambodia. With military victory over the Lon Nol government and absolute power in their hands, the Khmer Rouge wasted no time in building their ‘utopia’.

  THE GENOCIDE

  Within days of overthrowing the government, Pol Pot started a radical campaign to reconstruct Cambodia, modelling it on Mao Tse-Tung’s Cultural Revolution, which he had witnessed first-hand during a previous visit to China. He declared that he was about to ‘purify’ Cambodian society and banished any Western culture, city life, religion and any form of foreign influences. Embassies were closed and foreigners were forced to leave; Newspaper offices and television stations were shut down; radios and bicycles were confiscated; the use of the telephone and mail were curtailed; money was forbidden; and health care was eliminated – in fact Cambodia was completely shut off from the remainder of the world. Pol Pot’s intention was to create an extreme form of peasant communism, in which the population would all work together as labourers in a huge coalition of collective farmers.

  Giving them little time to gather their belongings, and under the threat of death, the inhabitants of the towns and cities were forced to leave their homes. Regardless of their physical condition and age, every member of the population was press-ganged into leaving – not one single person was exempt from the mass exodus. Those who did not obey were murdered, and children not old enough to work were taken away from their parents and placed in separate labour camps. Factories, schools, hospitals and universities were all closed and professional people in any field – lawyers, doctors, teachers, engineers, scientists alike – were all murdered along with any members of their families.

  Any form of religion was banned. Buddist monks were killed and their temples were destroyed. The slaughter of the population was so severe that even minor disabilities such as wearing glasses, was considered a weakness and the punishment was death. The main slogan for the Khmer Rouge was, To spare you is no profit, to destroy you is no loss.

  Those who escaped the massacre were forced into labour camps, where they worked for no money and the minimum of rations. They were housed in despicable conditions and forced to work exceptionally long hours. Any form of personal relationship was discouraged, along with any signs of affection. Before long people became weak and sick from overwork and lack of nourishment, and as there was no medical assistance, most died a sad and lonely death.

  Pol Pot’s new regime also targeted the minority groups, which included Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai and anyone with ethnic ancestry. Almost half of the Chum Muslim population were killed, along with 8,000 Christians. There was no end to the extremes that Pol Pot and his murderous communist party would go to, and even some of the party’s own leaders lived in fear. The Khmer Rouge frequently interrogated their own members if they were suspected of even the slightest thought of treachery of sabotage, often ending in imprisonment and execution. It is estimated that the death toll during Pol Pot’s reign was as many as two million people.

  KHMER ROUGE IN RETREAT

  On December 25, 1978, Vietnam launched a full-scale assault on Cambodia with the sole purpose of wiping out the Khmer Rouge and their evil leader. By January 7, 1979, Phnom Penh fell and Pol Pot was deposed. The remaining members of the Khmer Rouge, along with
Pol Pot, retreated into Thailand.

  The Vietnamese, now free to control, formed a puppet government (basically, one formed from foreign power), which included many members who had managed to defect from the Khmer Rouge. Pol Pot’s strict regimes had left Cambodia in a poor economic state, and with no foreign aid and no professional people left alive, they struggled to bring the country into any sort of order.

  The Khmer Rouge continued to oppose the new socialist government, but their organization was starting to crumble. Many of them had already defected to the new government, and many offered pleas to try to escape execution. The government did everything in their power to bring the leaders of the communist organization to justice and made plans for an international tribunal.

  Pol Pot, who had managed to obtain assistance from US relief agencies, had amassed 20,000–40,000 guerillas and waged a war against the succession of Cambodian governments, which was to last for over 17 years. The recovery of Cambodia and its people was a long, hard struggle. Pol Pol eventually lost control of the Khmer Rouge in the 1990s, and was arrested. However, before they were able to bring him to trial under an international tribunal, Pol Pot died of a heart attack in April 1998, at the age of 73.

  AFTER THE GENOCIDE

  From 1995 onwards mass graves were uncovered revealing just how extensive the atrocious massacre had been. The bones and skulls uncovered from the graves were preserved to create a potent memorial of what had happened, and the area became known as the ‘killing fields’. In Phnom Penh, the place where Pol Pot and his leaders carried out their acts of torture and murder, it is not only the skulls that are displayed, but also photographs of the victims are pinned to the walls.