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Tag Archives: M62 Motorway


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Judith Ward Wrongfully Convicted of M62 Coach Bombing

Judith Ward is wrongfully convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment on November 4, 1974, for the Provisional Irish Republican Army‘s (IRA) M62 coach bombing, which took place on February 4, 1974, killing twelve.

Ward, 25, from Stockport in Cheshire, receives a life term for each of those who died when the coach exploded on the M62 motorway. The sentences are to run concurrently with three other sentences of up to twenty years for causing explosions. She remains impassive as Justice Waller passes sentence.

During the trial the court hears that Ward had joined the army – from which she later deserts – on the instructions of the republican group, the IRA. Her detailed knowledge of bases helps to facilitate the coach bombing, prosecution barrister John Cobb QC alleges. She also gives information to the IRA which leads to two attacks on army targets in which six people die, Cobb adds. 

Ward initially confesses her crimes in a statement to police which she later retracts. She denies being a member of the IRA but photographs of her in the outlawed organisation’s uniform are shown to the jury at Wakefield Crown Court.

It also emerges in court that Ward was arrested after the bombing of Euston railway station in September 1973 but is later released. Questions are raised as to why the police let her go even though traces of explosives were found on her hands. 

As Ward is led from the courtroom to the cells, the only member of her family present, sister-in-law Jean Ward, sobs. Her father, Thomas, says earlier he does not believe his daughter is capable of such “brutal and callous acts.” Her brother, Tommy, says none of the family think Judith has ever been in the IRA. “We don’t think she was so heavily involved. There has been a lot of romancing,” he says. 

That is a point echoed in court by Ward’s solicitor, Andrew Rankin QC, who highlights many improbabilities in her confessions. They include having been married to an IRA man and having borne a child by another.

Ward spends 18 years in jail before her conviction is quashed in 1992. Her lawyers argue that the trial jury should have been told of her history of mental illness.

Three Appeal Court judges conclude that Ward’s conviction had been “secured by ambush.” They say government forensic scientists had withheld information that could have changed the course of her trial. Her case is one of a spate of miscarriage of justices revealed in the early 1990s. 

Others released around the same time include the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four.

After her release, Ward writes an autobiography, Ambushed, published in 1992. She subsequently starts a course in criminology and becomes a campaigner for prisoners’ rights.

(From: “On This Day – 4 November,” BBC News, news.bbc.co.uk)


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The M62 Coach Bombing

m62-coach-bombing

The M62 coach bombing occurs on February 4, 1974, on the M62 motorway in Northern England, when a Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) bomb explodes in a coach carrying off-duty British Armed Forces personnel and their family members. Twelve people, nine soldiers and three civilians, are killed by the bomb, which consists of 25 pounds of high explosive hidden in a luggage locker on the coach.

The coach has been specially commissioned to carry British Army and Royal Air Force personnel on leave with their families from and to the bases at Catterick and Darlington during a period of railway strike action. The vehicle departs from Manchester and is making good progress along the motorway. Shortly after midnight, when the bus is between junction 26 and 27, near Oakwell Hall, there is a large explosion on board. Most of those aboard are sleeping at the time. The blast, which can be heard several miles away, reduces the coach to a “tangle of twisted metal” and throws body parts up to 250 yards.

The explosion kills eleven people outright and wounds over fifty others, one of whom dies four days later. Amongst the dead are nine soldiers – two from the Royal Artillery, three from the Royal Corps of Signals, and four from the 2nd battalion Royal Regiment of Fusiliers. One of the latter is Corporal Clifford Haughton, whose entire family, consisting of his wife Linda and his sons Lee (5) and Robert (2), also die. Numerous others suffer severe injuries, including a six-year-old boy, who is badly burned.

The driver of the coach, Roland Handley, is injured by flying glass, but is hailed as a hero for bringing the coach safely to a halt. Handley dies at the age of 76 after a short illness in January 2011.

Suspicions immediately fall upon the IRA, which is in the midst of an armed campaign in Britain involving numerous operations, later including the Guildford pub bombing and the Birmingham pub bombings.

Reactions in Britain are furious, with senior politicians from all parties calling for immediate action against the perpetrators and the IRA in general. The British media are equally condemnatory. According to The Guardian, it is “the worst IRA outrage on the British mainland” at that time, whilst the BBC describes it as “one of the IRA’s worst mainland terror attacks.” The Irish newspaper The Sunday Business Post later describes it as the “worst” of the “awful atrocities perpetrated by the IRA” during this period.

IRA Army Council member Dáithí Ó Conaill is challenged over the bombing and the death of civilians during an interview and replies that the coach had been bombed because IRA intelligence indicated that it was carrying military personnel only.

Following the explosion, the British public and politicians from all three major parties call for “swift justice.” The ensuing police investigation led by Detective Chief Superintendent George Oldfield is rushed, careless, and ultimately forged, resulting in the arrest of the mentally ill Judith Ward who claims to have conducted a string of bombings in Britain in 1973 and 1974 and to have married and had a baby with two separate IRA members. Despite her retraction of these claims, the lack of any corroborating evidence against her, and serious gaps in her testimony – which is frequently rambling, incoherent, and “improbable” – she is wrongfully convicted in November 1974.

The case against Ward is almost completely based on inaccurate scientific evidence using the Griess test and deliberate manipulation of her confession by some members of the investigating team. The case is similar to those of the Guildford Four, the Birmingham Six, and the Maguire Seven, which occur at the same time and involve similar forged confessions and inaccurate scientific analysis. Ward is finally released in 1992, when three Appeal Court judges hold unanimously that her conviction was “a grave miscarriage of justice,” and that it had been “secured by ambush.”