IRA Blast Wrecks London Army Barracks, Killing Soldier, Injuring 9

An explosion ripped through a British army barracks in suburban London early Monday, killing one soldier and injuring nine others. Hours later, the outlawed Irish Republican Army claimed responsibility for the attack.

Police forensic experts said they have yet to uncover direct evidence of a bomb, but they said there was little doubt that the blast was deliberate.

The explosion left only a pile of debris where parts of the two-story, red-brick Inglis Barracks once stood. Firefighters and rescue workers dug several trapped soldiers from the wreckage.

The barracks is a small installation dealing mainly with military mail in the capital, and security was said to be especially loose there.

“With the benefit of hindsight, I think it is crystal clear that it would be possible to come into this place with impunity as long as you weren’t carrying something that looked suspicious,” said John Gorst, the local member of Parliament.

One young woman who lives nearby told the British Broadcasting Corp. that she and other civilians had frequently passed unchallenged through the installation’s perimeter gates. The same BBC program featured an embarrassed base security officer denying such a possibility.

If the attack was, in fact, the work of the IRA, it would mark the first time in nearly four years that the organization had successfully carried out a bombing attack in mainland Britain.

The last and, arguably, the most spectacular IRA operation here, was the bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton during the 1984 Conservative Party conference that claimed five lives and narrowly missed killing Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her entire Cabinet.

Members of the IRA’s legal political wing, Sinn Fein, have admitted that operations in mainland Britain have been virtually impossible since then because of the excessively tight security and close scrutiny of anyone entering Britain with even remote links with the organization.

The IRA has long considered that bombings in London or elsewhere in England have far greater political impact than attacks in Northern Ireland, where sectarian violence is an accepted part of life. The London attack is also the fifth outside Northern Ireland in recent months.

Thatcher ‘Very Distressed’

Thatcher, currently on a visit to Australia, said she was “very distressed” by news of the attack, which occurred only a few miles from her own parliamentary constituency.

The bomb brought immediate calls from politicians of all parties for tighter security at military bases.

“We’re talking about military installations,” said Labor’s spokesman on defense matters, Allan Rogers. “If they can’t be made safe, then God help the rest of us.”

The IRA has never accepted the deal struck for Irish independence in 1920, which provided a 26-county Irish Republic but left the six Protestant-dominated northern counties under British rule. The organization has waged a sporadic campaign of violence for a united Ireland ever since.

Monday’s fatality brings to 16 the number of British servicemen killed by the IRA so far this year, compared to just three last year. Monday’s victim was identified as Lance Cpl. Michael Robbins, 23, of Hampshire.

However, it has also admitted to killing 17 persons “by mistake” during the past nine months, either with bombs going off at the wrong time or by simply attacking the wrong people.

Last week, three members of a family were killed near Northern Ireland’s border with the republic when their vehicle was mistaken for that of a leading Northern Ireland judge.

Monday’s bombing is expected to further intensify already tight security measures in advance of this year’s Conservative Party conference, scheduled again in Brighton in October.