Just before 6pm on Wednesday 9 March 1994 four mortars shells hit Heathrow
Airport. Earlier, news agencies had been telephoned by a man with
an Irish accent and using a known IRA code word he said, ‘In one hour’s time,
a large number of bombs will be going off in Heathrow
Airport. Clear all runways. Stop all flights’. The Anti-Terrorist
branch of the Metropolitan Police and airport officials decided not to close
the airport after a sweep of the terminal buildings and the runways found
nothing suspicious. About 45 mins after the mortars landed they closed
Heathrow.
The missiles had been launched over the airport fence from 6ft-long
tubes fitted in the back of a red Nissan Micra parked about 400 yards away in
the Excelsior Hotel car park, just outside the airport. After launching the
missiles, a charge inside the car set it on fire and
the blaze spread to surrounding cars. The Nissan had been stolen in Kilburn the
previous Saturday night and fitted with false number plates. A special hotline
phone number was given out to contact the security forces with any information.
 |
| Burn out Nissan car with launch tubes (Getty Images) |
Two days later a second wave of
four mortars landed on the airport. They narrowly missed a group of cleaners
walking towards Terminal Four after working on a nearby Boeing 757. The police
found the launch unit had been hidden in woodland several hundred metres away.
Unfortunately, they failed to locate the third launch site which the terrorists
had partly buried in scrubland just inside the perimeter fence south of
Terminal Four. In the third attack on the 14 March five missiles took off and
one struck the terminal roof.
Fortunately, very little damage was caused because none of
the Semtex warheads fired in the three attacks exploded, due to a fault with
the detonators. The IRA had begun to receive Semtex high-explosive from Libya
in late 1986. It is horrifying to think what would have happened if a mortar shell
had exploded near a fully fuelled aircraft.
Here is a news clip about the Heathrow attack:
Two weeks earlier in West Hampstead a
man had been asked by an Irishman to move his car which
was blocking a garage door in Elmcroft Mews off West End Lane. The Mews are next to and behind today’s Nandos. From then
on, he noted the comings and goings in the Mews which he could see from his
flat. He was suspicious because he saw men with rubber gloves working in the
garage late at night. Three days after the Heathrow attack the West Hampstead
man rang the anti-terrorist hotline, tipping them off about the garage. When
they searched garage No.26 in the Mews they found traces of Semtex on the floor.
 | |
| No.26 on left, Elmcroft Garages, (Dick Weindling, Sept 2018) |
 |
| Nando's, 254 West End Lane, with entrance to Mews (Dick Weindling, 2018) |
On 4 May a man using the name 'Fraser' rang the owner to
return the keys and get his £50 deposit back, saying he
no longer needed to use the garage. An undercover officer pretending to be the
owner’s agent met Fraser and gave him the refund. He was followed back to his
flat in Earls Court. Anti-terrorist police and the security services
discovered his real name was Michael Gallagher. They set up a surveillance
operation on Gallagher for an astonishing two-and-a-half years. He was
followed from England
to Scotland, Ulster and Dublin. Hundreds of his conversations were recorded at his bugged
flat in Warwick Road where he lived with his girlfriend Mary Attenborough and
working in her computer firm. She had previously been a maths lecturer at South Bank University. A library of 1,700 tapes, covering 15,000 hours recording
were built up.
The tapes revealed Gallagher boasting
that he took his orders direct from Dublin, dealing with Donal Gannon, one of the top six IRA
leaders. But he became worried with the lack of contact and he started making
forbidden phone calls to his IRA contacts and arranged to meet his handler. A
team of 29 anti-terrorist officers and MI5 agents tracked Gallagher through
London, only to see his IRA contact abort the meeting and walk straight past
him in the street. From then on, the IRA feared Gallagher was becoming a
liability. He became isolated and lonely, often confiding his fears to his
girlfriend Mary, unaware they were being taped.
 |
| Undercover police photo of Gallagher at garage No.26 |
Gallagher was finally arrested on 28 October 1996 as by then police believed he would never lead them to the bigger IRA men they hoped to capture. Mary Attenborough was not charged.
On 24 February 1998
Gallagher was found guilty of conspiracy to cause an explosion after a trial
lasting two and a half months. Commander John Grieve, the head of the
anti-terrorist branch, said: ‘Gallagher was quite an unusual creature. He took
great risks. He lived in London
ready to do the IRA’s bidding and was essential to the IRA’s campaign on the
mainland. Without people such as him the IRA’s campaign would be impossible.’ Commander
Grieve thanked the West Hampstead man who called himself
a ‘nosey neighbour’, and said, ‘We asked for millions of eyes and ears and we
got one nugget of gold’. The judge suggested the man should be given £500 reward
for providing the crucial information.
 |
| Michael Gallagher, 1998 |
The jury refused to believe Gallager’s
story that he was merely showing off and that the conversations on the tapes
were describing the plot of a book he was going to write. They found him guilty,
and he was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment.
Born in Glasgow,
55 year old Gallagher was brought up by staunchly Nationalist Irish parents
from County Donegal.
He left school at 17 and got a job with the DSS, he married and had three sons.
His belief in a united Ireland
led him to make contacts with Republican hard-liners in Glasgow’s
bars. He regularly moved between England
and Scotland
gathering more Republican contacts. A strong family man, he would visit his sister, niece and nephew at their home in
Baillieston, Glasgow. After 12 years, he left the DSS and became a second-hand
furniture dealer. But after he began drinking heavily, his debts soared, the
business foundered and his wife left him. He began working for the IRA and was
given money to set up the 1994 attack by renting the West Hampstead
lock-up garage. The press dubbed him ’Mr Fix-it’.
In February 2011 it was announced that Michael Gallagher was
one of five IRA men serving long-term sentences in British jails, who would be
sent to Ireland
before Christmas to finish their sentences.
Today, most people in West Hampstead
have no idea that the IRA mortars launched in the Heathrow attack were made in
a garage behind the shops in West End Lane.
Comments
Post a Comment