Car Bomb Kills British Lawmaker

A bomb hidden beneath a car exploded today, killing a top Conservative Party lawmaker who was on the Irish Republican Army hit list, police said. There was no immediate admission of responsibility.

Ian Gow, chairman of the Northern Ireland Committee in the House of Commons, died a few minutes after the bomb exploded outside his home, said Inspector Mike Alderson of the Sussex police. No one else was injured.

Scotland Yard’s chief anti-terrorist officer, George Churchill-Coleman, said the attack appeared to be the work of the IRA.

Gow had been warned he was on a list of 100 lawmakers, judges and civil servants found in an IRA bomb factory in south London in December, 1988, Churchill-Coleman said.

Friends and neighbors in Hankham, on England’s southeast coast, said Gow had taken few precautions. “It would be easy for terrorists to get him,” said Jane Birch, a neighbor.

It appeared that a device packing about five pounds of explosives was placed underneath the driver’s seat of Gow’s car and exploded as soon as the car’s engine was started, Churchill-Coleman said.

“My impression is that it was some sort of tilt switch. Once you turn it on, it explodes immediately,” he said.

Gow, 53, was Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s parliamentary private secretary from 1979 to 1983.

But he resigned from a ministerial post in her government in 1985 to protest the Anglo-Irish Agreement that guaranteed Ireland a say in the province’s affairs. Gow thought the accord undermined British authority in Northern Ireland.

Irish Prime Minister Charles Haughey and Britain’s Roman Catholic Cardinal Basil Hume joined politicians in condemning the attack, the fourth slaying of a British lawmaker since 1969.

Gow’s killers were “plain, common murderers,” Thatcher said after spending nearly an hour with Gow’s wife, Jane, at the couple’s home near Eastbourne, 60 miles southeast of London.

Thatcher said the Gows and their two sons had spent some Christmas seasons with the Thatchers and the two families were close.