Provisional Irish Republican Army Campaign 1969–1997 - Incidents With British Special Forces

Incidents With British Special Forces

The IRA suffered some heavy losses at the hands of British special forces like the Special Air Service (SAS), the heaviest being the ambush and killing of eight armed IRA members at Loughgall in 1987 as the IRA gunmen attempted to destroy Loughgall police station. The East Tyrone Brigade was hit particularly hard by British killings of their members in this period, losing 28 members killed by British forces in the period 1987–1992, out of 53 dead in the whole Troubles. In many of these cases, Provisional IRA members were killed after being ambushed by British special forces. Some authors alleged that this amounted to a campaign of assassination on the part of state forces (see shoot-to-kill policy in Northern Ireland).

Another high profile incident took place in Gibraltar in March 1988, when three unarmed IRA members were shot dead by an SAS unit while scouting out a bombing target (see Operation Flavius). The subsequent funerals of these IRA members in Belfast were attacked by loyalist gunman Michael Stone. At a funeral of one of Stone's victims, two un-uniformed British Army corporals were abducted, beaten and shot dead by PIRA after intruding on the crowd (see Corporals killings).

There were, however, a number of incidents in which undercover operations ended in failure, such as the 1990 Operation Conservation in south County Armagh or a shoot-out at the village of Cappagh on 24 March 1990, where plain-clothes members of the security forces were ambushed by an IRA unit. On 2 May 1980, four IRA members were arrested by the RUC after being cornered by the SAS in a house in Antrim Road. The SAS commander Captain Herbert Westmacott was hit by machine gun fire and killed instantly.