Bodies of 3 IRA Guerrillas Met by Throng in Dublin
About 2,000 Irish Republican Army supporters turned up in a driving rain at Dublin airport today to welcome home the bodies of three IRA guerrillas shot to death during an abortive bombing mission in Gibraltar.
British and Irish police on both sides of the Northern Ireland border were on full alert as the bodies were flown in from the British rock colony on a privately chartered plane.
The coffins of the three were loaded onto the plane in Gibraltar by British air force personnel after civilian airport workers there had refused to handle them.
British and Irish security chiefs fear the funeral cortege, which the IRA views as a martyrs’ motorcade, could be turned into a giant Irish nationalist demonstration in support of its guerrilla cause. The funeral could be as soon as Thursday, St. Patrick’s Day.
A spokesman for Sinn Fein, political wing of the IRA, told reporters after the coffins arrived and were taken into the Dublin airport mortuary: “We hope for no conflict with authorities of either side of the border.”
A lone piper preceded the cortege as it wound its way out of the airport.
The dead included Mairead Farrell, 31, the first IRA woman guerrilla killed “on active service” in 12 years. Farrell, Daniel McCann, 30, and Sean Savage, 24, were killed on March 6 by British soldiers who suspected they had planted a massive car bomb in Gibraltar.
A car packed with explosives was found shortly afterward across the Spanish border in Marbella.
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