THE NORTH'S Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness has dismissed as a "securocrat fantasy" allegations that he had prior knowledge of the IRA Enniskillen bombing that killed 11 people on Remembrance Sunday in 1987.
According to British and Irish intelligence sources cited in a BBC programme to be broadcast tonight, Mr McGuinness was the senior figure on the IRA's Northern Command at about the period of the bombing.
The programme, Age of Terror: Ten Days of Terror on BBC 2 tonight, claims the Northern Command knew in advance about the plan to explode the bomb in Enniskillen on November 8th, 1987, and did nothing to stop it.
Det Chief Supt Norman Baxter, who led the investigation into the Enniskillen bombing, told BBC journalist Peter Taylor that the Enniskillen attack was not an unauthorised, one-off operation by a local IRA unit, but was carefully co-ordinated by three IRA units - two from the South and one from the North.
He says that prior to the bombing there were deliberations at a very senior level within the IRA. "The calculation was taken as to the number of casualties they could inflict on the civilian population against the number of casualties they could inflict on members of the security forces. And they decided that the risk was worth taking," he said.
"The civilians were collateral to the bomb but they were prepared to accept the number of casualties," added Det Chief Supt Baxter, who is also head of the long-running investigation into the 1998 Omagh bombing.
Taylor reports he was told by British and Irish intelligence sources that Mr McGuinness was the leading figure on the IRA's Northern Command at the time of the Enniskillen bombing, in which 11 Protestant civilians were killed.
Intelligence reports also indicated, according to the programme, that three days before the attack, Mr McGuinness, while accompanied by three IRA members from the South, was stopped by gardaí on the Donegal border.
"The subsequent intelligence assessment was that McGuinness was going to be briefed on the Remembrance Day attacks." The programme also reports that in the hours after the bombing Mr McGuinness was recorded leaving Belfast to travel to Fermanagh to meet members of the local IRA to find out what went wrong, and that he subsequently met the head of the IRA's Donegal operation.
Taylor also reports that "subsequently Gerry Adams and a senior figure from the IRA's General Headquarters' staff discussed declaring an IRA ceasefire at the beginning of December. Adams and McGuinness are reported to have fallen out over the proposal, with McGuinness saying on no account should the IRA go for a ceasefire".
Mr McGuinness yesterday described the claims as "completely false". He said the allegation that he was linked to IRA Northern Command at the time of the Enniskillen bombing was "a securocrat fantasy based on untrue briefings from faceless individuals within the intelligence apparatus long hostile to Sinn Féin".
"These are the same so-called reliable security sources who told the world that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction as a basis for the invasion of that country. That is the context within which this programme must be viewed," he added. "As for the bizarre allegation of a difference of opinion between myself and Gerry Adams on the issue of developing a peace process, the events of history clearly expose the inaccuracy of that claim," said Mr McGuinness.
