6 September 1920 General Sir Henry Wilson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, despised Irish republicans. In 1919, he observed in a letter to his predecessor, General Sir William Robertson, that ‘Ireland goes from bad to worse’, recommending that ‘a little blood shedding is needed.’ On 1 September, the following year, he was still deriding…
18 October 2012 During the autumn of 2012, the SAS conducted numerous armed raids against suspect Taliban members’ homes across the Afghan province of Helmand. Seven years later, the Sunday Times, reporting the suspected cover-up of a man and three boys who had been shot dead in their home, noted that individuals were often targeted ‘as a…
18 September 1961 Mounting evidence suggests the involvement of British intelligence services in the assassination of UN secretary general, Dag Hammarskjöld, on 18 September 1961. He was killed along with 15 others, when his DC-6 aircraft, which had taken off from Leopoldville, the capital of Belgian Congo, was downed shortly after midnight on its approach…
25 July 2018 Writing for The Spectator on 25 July 2018, the recently resigned Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, implied that the government would not hesitate in authorizing intelligence sharing to enable a drone strike assassination of targets suspected of terror crimes, even if they were not necessarily posing any imminent threat to life. Referring to Alexanda Kotey…
19 July 1947 Today in 1947, Bogyoke Aung San, ‘the father of modern day Myanmar’ and a committed parliamentary socialist, was shot dead by paramilitaries under orders of Burma’s former prime minister, U Saw, who had recently received weapons supplied by British army officers. Aung San, who, at just 32 years old, was the acting prime…
20 March 1920 At about 2 am on Saturday 20 March 1920, Tomas Mac Curtain, the Republican Lord Mayor of Cork, who was a leading figure in the long political struggle to end British rule, was shot dead in his own home by armed intruders with blackened faces. The police refused to investigate the murder…
17 January 1961 On 17 January 1961, Patrice Lumumba, Congo’s first democratically elected prime minister, was abducted, tortured and then shot dead in a coup masterminded by MI6. To prevent any possible autopsy, Belgian mercenaries, who had been involved in his death, dug up and dismembered his body from where it had been hastily buried,…
Douglas-Home considers the ‘crocodile option’ for Congo’s ousted prime minister [ 19 September 1960 ] In May 1960, Patrice Lumumba was elected prime minister of the Congo. He was a troublesome believer in independent economic development, who thought Congolese nationals rather than foreigners should be allowed to run the important offices of government and that…
GENERAL ERSKINE ADVISES WAR OFFICE NOT TO INVESTIGATE WAR CRIMES [ 27 August 1953 ] On 27 August 1953, General Erskine, commanding British forces in Kenya in a counter insurgency campaign to quell an anti-colonial insurgency, advised the War Office not to investigate the war crimes of the police or the King’s African Rifles, a…
DAILY EXPRESS HEADLINE – “JEWS DENY PERSECUTION BY NAZIS” [ 25 March 1933 ] Hitler had been in power for less than two months when the British press was already attempting to downplay the crimes of the Nazi regime. TONY BLAIR EMBRACES LIBYAN TYRANT COLONEL GADDAFI On 25 March 2004, Tony Blair embraced Libyan dictator…
