U.S. Sends Former IRA Member Back to Britain

The Bush Administration on Wednesday deported former Irish Republican Army member Joseph Doherty, ending his almost decade-long bid for asylum.

Doherty, a leading symbol of opposition to British rule in Northern Ireland, escaped from a maximum-security jail in Belfast in 1981 after being charged with killing a British army captain. He sought refuge in the United States and was arrested by FBI agents two years later.

Doherty’s lawyers said they were told he was taken before dawn from the federal prison in Lewisburg, Pa., and put on a plane to Britain.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled against Doherty in January despite arguments that he faced persecution if he were returned. Doherty was a political rallying point during his years of imprisonment. Supporters argued that Doherty was a political prisoner. Opponents charged that he was a terrorist.

More than 100 U.S. congressmen had asked the Supreme Court to rehear the case. One of them, New York Democrat Gary L. Ackerman, compared the federal marshals who deported Doherty to “a bunch of thieves in the night.”

In a statement, Doherty said: “I found myself seeking the safety and sanctuary of the American dream. This dream, for me, will end in a nightmare when the plane on which I was removed from the United States touches down on a British airfield in occupied northeast Ireland. . . . I shall carry on my life in the hell of a British prison.”

Some of Doherty’s supporters charged that the Justice Department deliberately waited until after the voting in New Hampshire before deporting him.

“Mr. Doherty is no more likely to receive justice at the hands of British authorities than he has at the hands of the U.S. Justice Department,” said New York City Mayor David N. Dinkins, who traveled to the prison in Pennsylvania to meet with Doherty last week.

Doherty was seized by the FBI while he was working in an Irish pub in New York in 1983. He was tried in absentia in a British court in Belfast and found guilty of killing Capt. Herbert R. Westmacott during the machine-gun ambush of a British army convoy in Northern Ireland.