IRA Man Gets Life Term in Bombing at Thatcher Hotel

A member of the outlawed Irish Republican Army was sentenced to life in prison Monday for killing five people in a 1984 bomb attack that narrowly missed its primary intended victim--Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

“You intended to wipe out a large part of the government and you very nearly did,” Justice Leslie Boreham told the defendant, Patrick Magee, 35, in passing sentence. “I am not concerned with your motives or what drives you. I am satisfied you enjoy terrorism.”

The judge added: “You are a man of exceptional cruelty and inhumanity.”

Altogether, Magee was given a total of eight concurrent life terms for his role in a recent series of IRA bombings.

As the sentences were read out, Magee refused to stand or answer his name. He was hauled to his feet by police officers until the judge finished.

25-Day Trial

The sentencing followed a 25-day trial at London’s Old Bailey criminal court in which Magee was convicted of planting a bomb in October, 1984, at a seafront hotel in the English Channel resort town of Brighton, where senior members of Thatcher’s Conservative Party had gathered for their annual conference.

In addition to the five dead, the bomb injured 34 others, severely damaged the room in which Thatcher was staying but was unoccupied at the time, and nearly gutted the Grand Hotel’s upper floors.

Thatcher was unhurt, but Conservative Party chairman Norman Tebbit and his wife, Margaret, were seriously injured. The dead included two senior party officers and the wives of three others.

Magee planted the 20- to 30-pound bomb, together with an elaborate timing device, while staying in a 6th-floor room at the Grand Hotel in mid-September, 1984, a month before the Conservative conference began.

He had registered at the hotel under an assumed name, and after an exhaustive police search he was the only hotel resident unaccounted for in the two months before the explosion. Police eventually identified him from fingerprints left on the hotel registration card.

In addition to the life sentences for the Brighton hotel bombing, Magee and three other IRA members were also given life terms for plotting a bombing campaign at a string of 16 hotels in London and other English cities that Boreham described as “a plot to bring about a most hideous catalogue of violence against innocent people and property.”

A fifth person was sentenced to eight years in prison for his role in the plot, which was uncovered days before the first bomb was set to explode.

In addition to five murder counts, Magee was convicted on three counts of offenses linked with explosives. He was given life terms on all eight counts, with the condition that he serve a minimum of 35 years.

There was no comment on the verdict from Thatcher’s office in Downing Street, but Tebbit, whose wife remains paralyzed from her injuries, expressed satisfaction at the sentences.

“I am glad that people who have done this will be locked up to prevent them from ever committing a similar crime,” he said.