AFP — A newly launched cache of FBI information has revealed a possible plot to assassinate Queen Elizabeth II throughout her 1983 go to to California.
The attainable menace adopted a telephone name made by “a man who claimed that his daughter had been killed in Northern Ireland by a rubber bullet”, in response to the doc that additionally refers to a bar frequented by Irish Republican Military (IRA) sympathisers.
The queen and her husband Prince Philip visited the west coast of the US in February and March 1983, and the journey handed off with out incident.
4 years earlier in 1979, IRA paramilitaries against British rule in Northern Eire killed Louis Mountbatten, the final colonial governor of India and an uncle of Philip, in a bomb assault.
The file states that the person claimed he was going to try to hurt the queen “by dropping some object off the Golden Gate Bridge onto the royal yacht Britannia when it sails underneath”.
Alternatively he “would attempt to kill Queen Elizabeth when she visited Yosemite National Park”, they added.
A separate file among the many paperwork, dated 1989, identified that whereas the FBI was unaware of any particular threats towards the queen, “the possibility of threats against the British monarchy is ever present from the Irish Republican Army”.
The queen, who died final September aged 96, has beforehand been reported to have been the goal of different assassination plots.
– Six blanks fired –
In 1970, suspected IRA sympathisers unsuccessfully tried to derail her practice west of Sydney, whereas in 1981 the IRA tried to bomb her on a go to to Shetland, off the northeast coast of Scotland.
In the identical yr, a mentally disturbed teenager fired a single shot in the direction of the queen’s automotive throughout a go to to New Zealand.
Christopher Lewis fired a single shot as she toured the South Island metropolis of Dunedin.
The botched try was coated up by police on the time and solely got here to gentle in 2018 when New Zealand’s Safety Intelligence Service (SIS) spy company launched paperwork following a media request.
Additionally in 1981, one other teenager fired six blanks at her in the course of the monarch’s Trooping the Color birthday parade in central London.
The queen rapidly calmed her startled horse and carried on whereas {the teenager} advised troopers who disarmed him he had “wanted to be famous”.
The next yr, in one of the well-known safety breaches of her reign, Michael Fagan managed to get into the queen’s bed room and spent 10 minutes speaking to her earlier than she may elevate the alarm.
The unemployed decorator had a number of drinks and scaled the partitions of Buckingham Palace, climbing up a drainpipe to enter the queen’s London residence.
He wandered into her bed room and reportedly sat on the top of the mattress for a chat with the perturbed monarch earlier than a palace staffer lured him away with the promise of a shot of whisky.
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