3 Charged in Plot to Kill British Official

Three Irish nationals were formally charged Monday with conspiring to murder Britain’s secretary of state for Northern Ireland, Tom King.

The three, two men and a woman, are believed by the police to be linked to the outlawed Irish Republican Army, which has waged a guerrilla campaign against British rule in Northern Ireland since the 1920s.

They appeared in a makeshift high-security courtroom in the town of Chippenham, 80 miles west of London, after being held for eight days without charge, the maximum allowable under Britain’s Prevention of Terrorism Act.

8 IRA Members Killed

Finbarr Cullen, 27, Martina Shanahan, 22, and John McCann, 24, were picked up Aug. 30 after reports of persons acting suspiciously not far from King’s family home near Chippenham.

Although King was vacationing in Scotland at the time, police took a serious view of the incident, alleging that the three were involved in an assassination plot.

Earlier this year, British security forces killed eight IRA members who had mounted an abortive attack on a Northern Ireland police station. Gerry Adams, head of the IRA’s political wing, Sinn Fein, which has not been outlawed, warned that the IRA would seek to avenge their deaths by killing Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and King, her minister responsible for the province of Northern Ireland.

The police said they recovered the equivalent of $4,800 in large bills from a tent one of the suspects was living in at a campsite about 20 miles from King’s home. All three of the suspects gave home addresses in the Irish Republic.

Three years ago, Thatcher and her entire Cabinet narrowly escaped with their lives when an IRA bomb exploded in a Brighton hotel where they were staying during the Conservative Party’s annual conference.

Since the arrest of the three alleged plotters, security has been tightened around Thatcher. Television newscasts on Monday evening gave out a special police telephone number for reporting any suspicious activities in connection with the Conservative Party’s annual convention, which is to take place early next month in Blackpool.

Before the Brighton bombing, the IRA had carried out a series of bomb attacks against high-profile targets in Britain, including the famous department store, Harrods, and a ceremonial military unit near Hyde Park, but no such attack has succeeded since then.

Letter Bombs

Last April, the IRA addressed a series of letter bombs to senior British officials, but all were intercepted. Two months earlier, an IRA cache filled with plastics explosives was found by the police in the county of Cheshire in the north of England.

People who are knowledgeable about its activities believe that the IRA recently shuffled its leadership in an effort to step up its guerrilla activities, both in Northern Ireland and England. The move followed election setbacks in which Sinn Fein failed to win a seat in the Irish national election last February and managed only to hold its one Northern Ireland seat in June.