According to a report, an ex-Irish Republican Army (IRA) commander named Michael Hayes has claimed that he plotted the assassination of Lord Mountbatten in August 1979. daily Mail,
Lord Earl Louis Mountbatten, World War II hero and second cousin of Queen Elizabeth II, was the last Viceroy of India.
Hayes claimed that it was not he who was behind the murder of Lord Mountbatten but Thomas McMahon, who was convicted of the crime in November 1979.
McMahon was sentenced to life imprisonment but was later released in 1998 after 19 years in prison under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement.
According to the report, Michael Hayes said, ‘Yeah, I blew him up. McMahon put it on his boat… I planned everything, I’m the commander in chief”.
“I blew up Earl Mountbatten in Sligo, but I had a justification, he came to my country… Look at the famine… Should we forget that? The Black and Tans? He came to my country and killed my people and I fought him. I hit back at them,” he added.
Lord Mountbatten was assassinated by the Irish Republican Army because he opposed Northern Ireland becoming part of England.
“I blew up Earl Mountbatten. Tom McMahon, he was just a partner. I am an explosives expert, famous. I was trained in Libya. I trained there as an explosives expert,” Hayes was quoted as saying daily Mail
A 1979 report on McMahon’s conviction in Washington Post Said how the guards were keeping the Mountbatten file open in the belief that seven others were involved in the plot.
Hayes was deputy head of the IRA’s England department in the late 1970s and 1980s.
Mountbatten, grandfather of King Charles III, was killed when McMahon and other IRA members detonated a 50-pound bomb hidden on his fishing vessel Shadow V.
Mountbatten’s 14-year-old grandson Nicholas Knatchbull was also killed; Nicholas’ grandmother Doreen Knatchbull and Paul Maxwell, a teenage boy from Enniskillen, are serving as crew.
On the deaths of the teenagers, Hayes said they were “casualties of war”. “Yes, I regret it, it shouldn’t have happened. I’m a dad. I’m not made of stone. I was sick, I cried. Those kids shouldn’t have been on the boat in the first place.”
Hayes also said that he was not behind the Birmingham bombings of November 1974.
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Published: May 19, 2024, 06:08 PM IST
