Tebbit: Brighton bomb victims also deserve inquiry
Victims of the Brighton bomb are as entitled to a public inquiry as those from Bloody Sunday, Tory peer Norman Tebbit said tonight.
Five people were killed when an IRA explosion ripped through the Conservatives’ conference hotel in 1984.
Tebbit had to be rescued from the rubble and his wife, Margaret, was paralysed but then-prime minister Margaret Thatcher escaped uninjured.
Tebbit said: “I think others who have suffered should be entitled to the same consideration as the victims in Londonderry.”
Mark Saville’s mammoth report into Bloody Sunday took 12 years to complete and cost almost £200m (€240m).
He found the 14 civil rights protesters who died and others who were injured to be completely innocent of provoking the shooting by soldiers.
Tebbit added: ``I think there should not be first- and second-class victims.
“If first-class victims in Londonderry are entitled to an inquiry to see whether there was indeed a plot which caused the shootings or whether it was a cock-up, which is what it appears to be, then why not the victims of Brighton?”
A total of 34 people were injured in the explosion at the UK resort’s Grand Hotel. Tebbit was Trade Secretary at the time.
Bomber Patrick Magee was given eight life sentences in 1986 for the attack.
His sentence, handed down at the Old Bailey, also came with a recommendation that he should serve a minimum of 35 years.
Mr Justice Boreham described him as “a man of exceptional cruelty and inhumanity”.
Magee was later released from prison early under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement.
Tebbit said an inquiry could investigate whether it was Magee who was the guiding hand behind the bombing or whether other higher level members of the IRA were involved.
“Everyone has a reasonable idea of one of the people in command of the IRA,” he added.
The North's Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness is a former IRA member and was named in the Saville report for carrying a gun during Bloody Sunday.
Tebbit went on: “If there is willingness to achieve closure and truth and reconciliation, it is long overdue that the terrorists who kidnapped, tortured and murdered victims should reveal where their bodies are.”
Known as the Disappeared, some IRA victims have never been recovered and are thought to be buried in remote areas.
