British Justice Faces New Challenge: IRA Sentences Appealed

Six alleged IRA bomb-makers who served long jail terms for terrorism began an appeal of their convictions Tuesday in the latest of a series of reviews shaking the foundations of British justice.

The hearing involving the “Maguire Seven” comes after two earlier embarrassing reverses for the British legal system in cases relating to the Irish urban guerrilla campaign against British rule in Northern Ireland.

The “Maguire Seven”--a man and wife, their two sons, her brother, a family friend and a man who later died--were jailed in 1976 after being convicted of making bombs for an Irish Republican Army campaign on the British mainland.

An inquiry last year found that forensic tests indicating they had handled nitroglycerin were unreliable.

The inquiry was initiated after the release in October, 1989, of the “Guildford Four”--three men and a woman who served 15 years in jail for pub bombings.

Their release was followed last March by the freeing of the “Birmingham Six,” a group of Irishmen convicted of killing 21 people in two bomb attacks in 1974. Their confessions were found to have been falsified.