A former IRA chief wanted over the kidnapping of a supermarket boss was arrested just hours before Northern Ireland Secretary Mo Mowlam was due to release him from parole, a court heard today.
Gardai swooped on the Dublin-Belfast commuter bus near the border with Dundalk in January 1998 and detained Maze prison escapee Brendan McFarlane.
Mr McFarlane has pleaded not guilty to three charges linked with the 1983 kidnapping of Don Tidey
He was charged with firearms offences linked with the November 1983 abduction of Don Tidey.
Mr Tidey was taken outside his Dublin home by an armed gang and held captive for more than three weeks in a secluded Co Leitrim wood before being rescued by the security forces.
McFarlane, of Jamaica Street, Belfast, has pleaded not guilty to three charges linked with the crime.
On day five of his trial at Dublin’s Special Criminal Court, Superintendent James Sheridan said that on January 5th, 1998 he received a call from one of his superiors to say a man fitting McFarlane’s description had boarded the bus in Dublin.
He was a detective garda based in Dundalk at the time and he stopped the bus at a permanent checkpoint near the border with two other officers.
During cross-examination McFarlane’s barrister asked if he was aware that Ms Mowlam was due to sign McFarlane’s final papers releasing him from parole at 3pm that day.
Mr Sheridan said he was surprised when McFarlane told him. “Absolutely I was,” he told the court.
McFarlane had been imprisoned at the Maze in Belfast since 1975 for his part in the IRA bombing of a bar in the city’s Shankill Road in which five people were killed.
He was the head of the Provisional IRA prisoners at the Maze and escaped in the mass breakout by 38 inmates in September 1983.
He was arrested in Amsterdam in early 1986, extradited to Northern Ireland and released on parole from the Maze in 1997.