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Former cop William McClure (right) attacks reporter Jordan at his house
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The Rock Bar near Keady as it was in 1976
Glenanne gang bomber and former RUC officer Laurence McClure flew into a rage this week when the Sunday World quizzed him about police collusion.
Just before he assaulted this reporter, who was pressing him about an RUC bomb and gun attack on a rural pub, McClure conceded that he and his paramilitary police pals had colluded in loyalist terrorism.
He screamed at me: “This had nothing to do with the UVF – it was just a bunch of police officers involved!”
The burly rogue cop then punched this reporter repeatedly while dodging questions about his role in a reign of loyalist terror – planned and orchestrated by the notorious Glenanne Gang.
Historic Enquiry Team files show the Glenanne gangsters claimed the lives of 120 people during the height of the Troubles, all but one of them in rural south Armagh.
In particular, the Sunday World demanded to know why former Reserve Constable McClure, as he was then, placed an explosive device outside the Catholic-owned Rock Bar near Keady while his police officer pal Billy McCaughey shot an innocent man who had just left the bar, before firing wildly through the pub window,
By a stroke of good fortune for the men inside, only the detonator of the bomb exploded, scattering chards of metal across the road outside.
An HET report confirmed that the entire operation was carried out by four serving RUC officers, who also led double lives as ruthless loyalist terrorists.
Laurence McClure played a leading role in the Rock Bar attack and several other atrocities where innocent lives were lost. He was part of a team involved in a gun and bomb attack in a pub in which three people were killed in 1975 and was named – although he denied it – as being involved in the Dublin/Monaghan bomb attacks.
During the Rock Bar attack, McClure and his mates all wore dark coloured boiler suits over their RUC tunics to hide the fact that they were police officers.
And one of them. Constable Ian Mitchell, even had the brass neck later the same evening to attend the scene of the attack and take statements.
However, if the Rock Bar attack had worked out the way McClure and his RUC pals planned, it would have wiped out 17 Catholics who were enjoying a Saturday night drink in their local.
We also asked McClure to explain to our readers the close connection between the UVF in Co. Armagh and the 40-strong security force-controlled Glenanne Gang which was based at a farm owned by part time RUC man and fellow gang member Jim Mitchell.
But seconds before he lashed out with his fists, a red-faced and extremely angry McClure yelled at this reporter: “It had nothing to do with the UVF – it was only a bunch of policemen involved!”
Astonishingly, former Constable McClure – once a trusted member of the RUC’s elite anti-terror Special Patrol Group – claimed the bomb, which was packed with 10lbs of explosives encased in metal filings from McClure’s garage workshop, was only a hoax device aimed at frightening the pub regulars.
He barked: “That bomb was never going to go off!”
But when we told McClure we didn’t believe a word he was saying, as we had seen the HET report into the attack and read journalist Anne Cadwallader’s recent book ‘Lethal Allies’, about security force collusion in Northern Ireland, he snapped completely.
The six feet plus ex-peeler and convicted terror chief, lashed out with his fists.
McClure continued to punch and push this reporter while he tried his best to get answers about the Glenanne Gang’s murderous campaign in south Armagh.
McClure screamed: “Get out of here! Get away from my door and get off my property.”
And he added: “I want nothing to do with you.”
The Rock Bar attack took place on June 5 1976. It was six months to the day, since the shocking Kingsmills Massacre near Whitecross, south Armagh, when the IRA, using a false name flag of convenience, gunned down 10 innocent Protestant linen trade workers.
Eventually all of the RUC men involved in the Rock Bar attack were rounded up.
But by that time Sergeant Billy McCaughey, who had acted as a close protection guard for Ulster Unionist politician John Taylor, had murdered Catholic shopkeeper William Strathearn, in Ahoghill, Co. Antrim in April the year after the pub attack.
Along with his fellow SPG colleague John Weir, McCaughey had called on Mr Strathearn after his shop was closed, pleading with him to supply medicine for a sick child.
Mr Strathearn did as he was asked. But when he let the RUC men inside, McCaughey shot him dead.
The charges against the rogue RUC men were eventually watered down to point where they were practically irrelevant to crimes to which they were linked.
Appearing before Lord Chief Justice Lowry four years later, Reserve Constable Laurence McClure received a two year sentence suspended for three years, for possession of explosives with intent and possession of a firearm with intent.
Sergeant McCaughey – the gunman who shot Mick McGrath and sprayed the bar with bullets – was given a seven year stretch for a variety of terror offences which the judge said should run concurrent to his life sentence for the murder of William Strathearn.
See also: MP wants Glenanne gang truth