Rebel’s jail term quashed

Press, 11 October 1985, Page 6

Rebel’s jail term quashed

NZPA-Reuter Belfast

A Belfast appeal court quashed yesterday a murder conviction against a former guerrilla leader, Dominic McGlinchey, once described as Ireland’s most wanted man.

But he was ordered to be held for 48 hours pending a prosecution appeal to the House of Lords, Britain’s highest legal authority. McGlinchey, aged 30, was sentenced to life imprisonment in December for murdering a postmistress in 1977.

The appeal judges ruled that affidavits signed by McGlinchey while he was trying to fight extradition in the Irish Republic should not have have been admitted as evidence. In them he had admitted that at the time of the murder he had been a member of the Irish Republican Army. The police believe he once led the Irish National

Liberation Army, which claimed responsibility for bombings and shootings in the early 1980 s. Courts in the south had refused extradition for socalled “political offences”. But the Irish Supreme Court ruled last year that there was a difference between “what reasonable, civilised people would regard as political activity” and other crimes.

On the basis of that judgment McGlinchey, who had been on the run in the South since jumping bail in Dublin in 1982, was handed over to the Northern Ireland police in March last year hours after he was arrested in a remote farmhouse in southwest Ireland after a gunfight with the police. If yesterday decision is upheld by the Lords, McGlinchey is expected to be extradited back to the South, where he is wanted in connection with the shoot-out and other offences.