Toyota van passed through Loughgall village at a quarter past seven. SAS men were hiding behind the wall of the church as it drove past them, but they held their fire. They wanted the van and mechanical digger to reach the police station as this would give the SAS men inside an excuse to open fire in ‘self-defence’.
At precisely 7.20 p.m., possibly trying to ascertain if anyone was still in the building, Arthurs drove the mechanical digger to and fro a few times, with Gormley and O’Callaghan now deliberately putting their weapons on view. What happened next is still in dispute.
As the terrorists all knew that the Loughgall RUC station was empty from seven o’clock every evening, their timing of the attack is surely an indication that their purpose was to destroy the building, not take lives. More importantly, it begs the question of why the ASU team leader, Patrick Kelly, a very experienced and normally astute IRA fighter, would do what he is reported to have done.
Though believing that the police station was empty, Kelly climbed out of the cabin of the Toyota van with the driver, Donnelly, and proceeded to open fire with his assault rifle on the front of the building. Donnelly and some of the others then did the same.
Instantly, the SAS ambush party inside the building opened fire with a fearsome combination of 7.62mm Heckler & Koch G3-A4K assault rifles and 5.56mm M16 Armalites, catching the terrorists in a devastating fusillade, perforating the rear and side of the van with bullets and mowing down some of the men even before the 7.62mm GPMGs in the copse had roared into action, peppering the front of the van and catching the remaining terrorists in a deadly crossfire.
Hit several times, Kelly fell close to the cabin of the van with blood spreading out around him from a fatal head wound. Realizing what was happening, the experienced Jim Lynagh and Patrick McKearney scurried back into the van, but died in a hail of bullets that tore through its side panel. Donnelly had scrambled back into the driver’s seat, but was mortally wounded in the same rain of bullets before he could move off. After ramming the mechanical digger into the side of the building, the driver, Arthurs, and another terrorist, Eugene Kelly, died as they tried in vain to take cover behind the bullet-riddled Toyota.
Even as the driver of the mechanical digger was dying in a hail of bullets, O’Callaghan was igniting the fuse of the 200lb bomb with a Zippo lighter. He then took cover beside Gormley.
The roar of the exploding bomb drowned out even the combined din of the GPMGs, assault rifles and Armalites. The spiralling dust and boiling smoke eventually settled down to reveal that the explosion had blown away most of the end of the RUC station nearest the gate, demolished the telephone exchange next door, and showered the football clubhouse with raining masonry. The mechanical digger had been blown to pieces and one of its wheels had flown about forty yards, to smash through a wooden fence and land on the football pitch. Some of the police and SAS men inside the building had been injured by the blast and flying debris.
When the bomb went off, Gormley and O’Callaghan tried to run for cover, but Gormley was cut down by heavy SAS gunfire as he emerged from behind the wall where he had taken cover. O’Callaghan was cut to pieces as he ran across the road from the badly damaged building.
But the IRA men were not the only casualties.
Because the GPMG teams hidden in the copse were targeting a building that stood close to the Armagh road, the oblique direction of fire meant that they also fired many rounds into the football pitch opposite and into parts of the village, including the wall of the church hall, where children were playing at the time. In addition, three civilian cars were passing between the RUC station and the church as the battle commenced.
Driving in a white Citroën past the church and down the hill towards the police station, Oliver Hughes, a thirty-six-year-old father of three, and his brother Anthony heard the thunderclap of the massive bomb, braked to a halt immediately and started to reverse the car. Unfortunately, both men were in overalls similar to those worn by the terrorists, so the SAS soldiers hidden near the church, assuming they were terrorist reinforcements, opened fire, peppering the Citroën with bullets, killing Oliver Hughes outright and badly wounding his brother, who took three rounds in the back and one in the head.
Travelling in the opposite direction, up the hill towards the church, another car, containing a woman and her young daughter, was also sprayed with bullets and screeched to a halt. In this instance, before anyone was killed the commander of one of the SAS groups raced through the hail of bullets to drag the woman and her daughter out of the car to safety. Miraculously, he succeeded.
The third car contained an elderly couple, Mr and Mrs Herbert Buckley. Both jumped out of their car and threw themselves to the ground, to survive unscathed.
Another motorist, a brewery salesman, had stopped his car even closer to the main action – between the IRA’s Toyota and the copse where the two GPMG crews were dug in – and looked on in stunned disbelief as a rain of GPMG bullets hit the blue van. During a lull in the firing, he jumped out of his car and ran to find shelter behind the bungalows next to the police station. He never reached them, for after being rugby-tackled by an SAS trooper, he was held in custody until his identity could be established.
When the firing ceased, all eight of the IRA terrorists were found to be dead. Within thirty minutes, even as British Gazelle reconnaissance helicopters were flying over the area and British Army troops were combing the countryside in the vain pursuit of other terrorists, the SAS men were already being lifted out.
The deaths of the eight terrorists were the worst set-back the IRA had experienced in sixty years. During their funerals the IRA made it perfectly clear that bloody retaliation could be expected. It was a threat that could not be ignored by the British government.
‘It is the belief of our Intelligence chiefs,’ the man addressed only as ‘Mr Secretary’ informed the top-level crisis-management team in a basement office in Whitehall on 6 November 1987, ‘that the successful SAS ambush in Loughgall last May, which resulted in the deaths of eight leading IRA terrorists, will lead to an act of reprisal that’s probably being planned right now.’
There was a moment’s silence while the men sitting around the boardroom table took in what the Secretary was saying so gravely. This particular crisis-management team was known as COBR – it represented the Cabinet Office Briefing Room – and all those present were of considerable authority and power in various areas of national defence and security. Finally, after a lengthy silence, one of them, a saturnine, grey-haired man from British Intelligence, said: ‘If that’s the case, Mr Secretary, we should place both MI5 and MI6 on the alert and try to anticipate the most likely targets.’
‘Calling in MI5 is one thing,’ the Secretary replied, referring to the branch of the Security Service charged with overt counter-espionage. ‘But before calling in MI6, would someone please remind me of the reasoning behind what was obviously an exceptionally ambitious and contentious ambush.’
Everyone around the table knew just what he meant. MI6 was the secret intelligence service run by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. As its links with the FCO were never publicly acknowledged, it was best avoided when it came to operations that might end up with a high public profile – as, for instance, the siege of the Iranian Embassy in London in May 1980 had done.
‘The humiliation of the IRA,’ said the leader of the Special Military Intelligence Unit (SMIU) responsible for Northern Ireland. ‘That was the whole purpose of the Loughgall ambush.’
‘We’re constantly trying to humiliate the IRA,’ the Secretary
