P.M. returns to scene of I.R.A. attack

Press, 12 October 1988, Page 10

P.M. returns to scene of I.R.A. attack

NZPA-Reuter Brighton Under heavy guard, the British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, has returned to Brighton for the annual conference of her Conservative Party for the first time since she was nearly killed by an I.R.A. bomb in 1984.

The Government has mounted a huge security net to ensure there is no repeat of the Irish Republican Army bomb which ripped through the hotel where Mrs Thatcher and her Cabinet were staying, killing five people and injuring dozens. “After the way the staff stood by us and were marvellous four years ago, we could not have gone anywhere else,” Mrs Thatcher told journalists as she arrived at the Grand Hotel on Monday

evening. Mrs Thatcher was working on papers in her suite in the early hours of the last morning of the 1984 party conference when the bomb went off, tearing a great gash in the front of the building. Asked if her return to Brighton was a deliberate stand against the 1.R.A.,

she said, “The deliberate stand against terrorism was taken after the incident when we all went on the platform in the conference hall on time.” Mrs Thatcher visited the Grand Hotel when it was reopened in 1986 after a £1 million ($1.7 million) facelift. The same year, I.R.A. guerrilla Patrick Magee was jailed for life after being found guilty of planting the bomb, which the police said was hidden in one of the hotel’s bath-

rooms about a month before it went off. The conference centre and the neighbouring Grand Hotel form part of a “security island” the size of a city block which has been surrounded by steel and concrete crash barriers. Delegates are subjected to body searches, sniffed

by electronic explosives detectors and their bags passed through airportstyle X-ray scanning machines. An air exclusion zone has been declared over Brighton — a police helicopter circles overhead — and a Royal Navy minesweeper is anchored a few hundred metres offshore opposite the conference centre. The police say that in spite of £1.5 million security net, there is still a high risk of another

I.R.A. attack. But the conference chairman, Sir lan MacLeod, who saw a man in the next bedroom die in the 1984 explosion, said he was confident about the security measures. “I feel very safe,” he told a news conference. “I reckon this is the safest place in England.”