Secrecy bid over Miami Showband massacre

Posted by Jim on June 24, 2018

The British Crown Forces are refusing to release documents relating to

top loyalist paramilitary Robin ‘The Jackal’ Jackson, a former British
soldier linked to the Miami Showband massacre and other suspected acts
of collusion.

Three members of the popular band were taken from their tour bus and
shot dead on a country road after a gig in Banbridge, County Down in
July 1975. Jackson, who died in 1998, had been linked by fingerprints to
one of the murder weapons used in the massacre. He had been a member of
the British Army’s Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR).

Victims of the attack are suing both the British Ministry of Defence and
PSNI police over suspected collaboration between serving soldiers and
the UVF paramilitary killers.

A British government minister is to decide whether to grant requests by
the British Army and PSNI for ‘Public Interest Immunity’ (PII) orders to
suppress the material on Jackson and related collusion within the UDR.

Military chiefs defending the legal action have claimed documents on the
soldiers involved have also been destroyed. The lawyer representing survivors
and relatives of murdered group members said he had been told material
on vetting and training UDR soldiers linked to the atrocity had been
destroyed more than a decade ago, but had been given no other
explanation.

The band had been travelling in their van to Dublin when a fake British
army patrol made up of UDR soldiers and UVF members stopped them at a
bogus checkpoint outside Newry. Band members were made to line up at the
side of the road while attempts were made to hide a bomb on the van.

The device exploded prematurely, killing some of the would-be bombers.
Their accomplices then opened fire on the band, murdering lead singer
Fran O’Toole, guitarist Tony Geraghty and trumpeter Brian McCoy. Two
other band members, Des McAlea and Stephen Travers, were also injured
but survived.

Survivor Stephen Travers said of the development: “The only response
from British authorities to the charge of murdering three members of the
Miami Showband and the attempted murder of two others is to run and hide
behind a PII cert. Any British minister who grants them this cert will
be complicit in the crime.”

He added: “Until the Chief Constable of the Police Service of Northern
Ireland stops hiding the files on Robin Jackson, the mass-murderer and
butcher of my band-mates, I will have no option but to view them both as
two sides of the same coin.”