3 September 1998 Edition
Back issue: SAS kills three Volunteers
Three young men in the front line of the struggle for a free and peaceful Ireland paid the ultimate price for their dedication to their people when they were mown down by an SAS death squad. IRA volunteers Brian Mullin, and Martin and Gerard Harte died near their own homes in what was a carefully laid ambush.
The gunfire had hardly ceased in Tyrone on Tuesday when unionist politicians were crowing over the deaths of the volunteers and calling for more of the same. From other quarters, including the SDLP and the Dublin government, polite questions were raised about the circumstances of the deaths, but there were none of the moralistic and generalised condemnations of violence which follow IRA operations.
From the British government itself - the government which ordered the killings - there was a studied silence. It was a silence shared by the faceless foreign gunmen it sent into County Tyrone to remove three more young Irish people whom it considered a threat to its rule in this country.
The gunfire had hardly ceased in Tyrone on Tuesday when unionist politicians were crowing over the deaths of the volunteers and calling for more of the same. From other quarters, including the SDLP and the Dublin government, polite questions were raised about the circumstances of the deaths, but there were none of the moralistic and generalised condemnations of violence which follow IRA operations.
From the British government itself - the government which ordered the killings - there was a studied silence. It was a silence shared by the faceless foreign gunmen it sent into County Tyrone to remove three more young Irish people whom it considered a threat to its rule in this country.