IRA GUNMEN “let out a big roar like a hurrah” as two senior RUC policemen lay dead after an ambush on a rural Border road in March 1989, the Smithwick Tribunal has been told.
Chief Supt Harry Breen and Supt Bob Buchanan were returning from a meeting in Dundalk Garda station when they were ambushed at a “blind spot” on the Edenappa Road just north of the Border, near Jonesboro, Co Armagh.
Yesterday, the tribunal heard eyewitness accounts of the moments before and after the ambush.
The tribunal was established to inquire into suggestions that members of An Garda Síochána or other employees of the State colluded in the killings.
The tribunal also heard from retired senior assistant chief constable David Cushley that the RUC had no information about an IRA mole in Dundalk Garda station. Mr Cushley also cast doubt on previous evidence from another RUC assistant chief constable, using the identity of Witness 18, who said the two murdered officers had contravened a direct order in travelling to Dundalk.
Eyewitness Finbarr King, who worked in a nearby scrapyard, said he had been travelling in a car with a co-worker when they came across a roadblock and were ordered from their car by a paramilitary who told them to lie face-down on the road.
He said he saw a dark-coloured car driving from the Dundalk direction.
As it approached a dip in the road, it was overtaken by a van which “cut it off”, and both vehicles stopped. He said two men got out of the driver and passenger doors of the van, while about three others emerged from a side door. “The whole lot of them opened fire,” he said.
Mr King said the driver of the car tried to escape by reversing, but the car did not travel far before stalling and rolling backwards, coming to rest on the verge.
He heard the firing stop and a further single shot before “they all got into the van, as they were exiting the area they let out a big roar, like hurrah”, he said.
Schoolteacher Maurita Halpin, who was also stopped at the roadblock, said the passenger in the car, later identified as Mr Breen, tried to surrender after their car was trapped, but was shot.
“They must have realised they wouldn’t make it and the passenger got out and came round in front of the car and put his hands up and they shot him. He fell on to the road,” she said. She also told the tribunal: “The other man, I think the driver, I am not sure whether he opened the door, or whether they went down and opened the door, but they shot him behind the wheel.”
Ms Halpin said she had been traumatised by the incident but recounting what she witnessed to Garda special branch was “the worst part”.
She said she feared being questioned by the “British establishment” as she worked in the south Armagh area and some of the children she taught were from republican families. Ms Halpin told Judge Peter Smithwick she might not have travelled to Dublin to give evidence were it not for the peace process.
Earlier Mr Cushley told Judge Smithwick he would be “astounded” if the murdered officers had been told not to go to Dundalk, as claimed by Witness 18 on Thursday.
Mr Cushley said the issues under investigation by the officers – money-laundering and oil smuggling – had been raised at the most senior levels between the secretary of state and the chief constable, and it would not have been possible to arrange an operation in conjunction with the gardaí “over the telephone”.
Mr Cushley said he had no recollection of conversations claimed by Witness 18 in Thursday’s evidence.
The import of these conversations was a claim by Witness 18 that he had told Mr Cushley he had ordered the men not to go South, and they had disobeyed.
Mr Cushley told the tribunal: “Why would he be telling me that? If it had ever been mentioned in my presence I believe it would have been etched in my memory to my dying day.”
He said such a conversation would have been as memorable as remembering where one was when President Kennedy had been shot.
“It would have been reflected in my psyche all the days of my life. If it had happened I do believe I would have recalled it,” he said.
