Killing of two corporals still vivid in mind of the public

It is an image of the Northern troubles that few people will forget

It is an image of the Northern troubles that few people will forget. The last minutes of the lives of two British army corporals who drove into the funeral cortege of an IRA man in west Belfast on March 19th, 1988, were captured on TV cameras and the pictures shown around the world.

The pictures showed an angry crowd rush towards the car, clamber on to its roof, smash the windows with an iron bar and drag the two men out. Minutes later they were dead, shot by the IRA once it was established who they were.

It will probably never be known why Cpl Derek Woods (24) and Cpl Robert Howes (23) drove into Andersonstown. They were in plain clothes but were armed, and had no official reason to be there.

A general outcry in the North and beyond branded the killings "barbaric", but people in west Belfast have always insisted they must be seen in the context of a series of extraordinary events during the previous two weeks.

READ MORE

These began on March 6th on the Rock of Gibraltar when three IRA members were shot dead by the SAS. At their funerals loyalist Michael Stone launched his frenzied attack on mourners, killing three people. It was at the funeral of one of Stone's victims that the corporals were killed.

The controversial SAS killings of the three IRA members in Gibraltar set off days of rioting in west Belfast. Mairead Farrell (31), Daniel McCann (30) and Sean Savage (23) were planning a bomb attack on a British military base, but all three were unarmed when they were shot dead at close range.

A bitter controversy ensued for years about what exactly occurred and whether the SAS ever had any intention other than to kill them on the spot. In 1995 the European Court of Human Rights ruled that they had been unlawfully killed.

The three were to be buried in the republican plot in Milltown cemetery on March 16th. Security forces stayed away from the funeral, a move that had been requested by the SDLP. It was the first time such a decision had been taken. Everything went peacefully until the last of the coffins was being lowered into the ground.

It was then that the first shots rang out. Seconds later Stone threw one of seven grenades he was carrying, and there was pandemonium among the huge crowd in the graveyard as people dived behind headstones. Reports described mourners becoming hysterical as Stone continued to lob grenades into the crowd.

The Sinn Fein president, Mr Gerry Adams, who was at the graveside with other party leaders, appealed for calm, and the burial continued. Again it was an extraordinary scene, filmed by international television crews. Stone, with a shock of black, curly hair, stopped frequently and used two handguns to fire on a crowd of men who pursued him as he ran towards the perimeter of the cemetery, alongside the M1 motorway.

They eventually overpowered him when his gun jammed, but not before he had killed three people and injured more than 60 others.

Those who were killed, John Murray (26), Thomas McErlean (20) and Kevin Brady (30), were praised for their bravery in chasing Stone. The IRA later admitted that Brady was one of its members.

Stone was at first bundled into a hijacked car on the motorway by the men who overpowered him, but the vehicle was stopped a short distance away by the RUC.

Police later described Stone as "exultant" when he was arrested. He admitted three other killings, which UDA leaders said he did not actually carry out, but he quickly became a cult figure in hardline loyalist areas. When he was sentenced, the judge recommended that he serve at least 30 years.

He is currently in a UDA wing of the Maze prison, and was one of five inmates who met the Northern Secretary, Dr Mo Mowlam, when she visited the jail earlier this year, to discuss prisoners' concerns over the peace process.

Kevin Brady's funeral took place three days later. The British army speculated that Cpls Woods and Howes, who were members of the Royal Corps of Signals, strayed into the funeral by accident. Cpl Howes had been posted to Belfast the previous month, but Cpl Woods had served in the North for some time.

In their journey from a barracks off the Falls Road to their base at Lisburn, they had been advised to avoid the funeral at Andersonstown. Father Alex Reid, from the Redemptorist Monastery in Clonard, who was later to play an important role in brokering the IRA ceasefire in 1994, prayed over the two men after they were shot dead in an alleyway off the Andersonstown Road.

He told reporters that the most humane gesture he had seen that day was when a local woman took off her coat and put it over the face of one of the soldiers, saying: "He's somebody's son, God have mercy on him."

More than 30 people were charged in connection with the corporals' killings, and civil liberties groups expressed concerns about the safety of a number of the convictions. In June last year, Patrick Kane, who was sentenced to life in 1990, was cleared of involvement in the killings.