Paul Magee

Paul "Dingus" Magee (born 30 January 1948) is a former volunteer in the Belfast Brigade of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) who escaped during his 1981 trial for killing a member of the Special Air Service (SAS) in 1980. After serving a prison sentence in the Republic of Ireland, Magee fled to England where he was imprisoned after killing a policeman in 1992. He was repatriated to the Republic of Ireland as part of the Northern Ireland peace process before being released from prison in 1999, and subsequently avoided extradition back to Northern Ireland to serve his sentence for killing the member of the SAS.

Background and early IRA activity Magee was born in the Ballymurphy area of Belfast on 30 January 1948. He joined the Belfast Brigade of the IRA, and received a five-year sentence in 1971 for possession of firearms. He was imprisoned in Long Kesh, where he held the position of camp adjutant. In the late 1970s and early 1980s he was part of a four-man active service unit, along with Joe Doherty and Angelo Fusco, nicknamed the "M60 gang" due to their use of an M60 general purpose machine gun. On 9 April 1980 the unit lured the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) into an ambush on Stewartstown Road, killing Constable Stephen Magill and wounding two others. On 2 May the unit were planning another attack and had taken over a house on Antrim Road, when an eight-man patrol from the British Army's Special Air Service arrived in plain clothes, after being alerted by the RUC. As the SAS members at the front of the house exited the car the IRA unit opened fire with the M60 machine gun from an upstairs window, hitting Captain Herbert Westmacott in the head and shoulder. Westmacott was killed instantly, and is the highest-ranking member of the SAS killed in Northern Ireland. The remaining SAS members at the front of the house, armed with Colt Commando automatic rifles, submachine guns and Browning pistols, returned fire but were forced to withdraw. More members of the security forces were deployed to the scene, and after a brief siege the remaining members of the IRA unit surrendered. On 10 June Magee and seven other prisoners, including Joe Doherty, Angelo Fusco and the other member of the IRA unit, took a prison officer hostage at gunpoint in Crumlin Road Jail. After locking the officer in a cell, the eight took other officers and visiting solicitors hostage, also locking them in cells after taking their clothing.

Imprisonment in the Republic of Ireland Magee escaped across the border into the Republic of Ireland. Eleven days after the escape he appeared in public at the Wolfe Tone commemoration in Bodenstown, County Kildare, where troops from the Irish Army and the Garda's Special Branch attempted to arrest him, but failed after the crowd threw missiles and lay down in the road blocking access. In October 1991 the Supreme Court in Dublin ordered his return to Northern Ireland to serve his sentence for the murder of Captain Westmacott, but Magee had jumped bail and a warrant was issued for his arrest. Magee and O'Brien were questioned by the unarmed police officers, who became suspicious and called for back-up. O'Brien was found guilty of attempted murder and received an eighteen-year sentence. The prisoners, in possession of two guns that had been smuggled into the prison, scaled the prison walls using knotted sheets. A guard was shot and wounded during the escape, and the prisoners were captured after being chased across fields by guards and the police. Magee had refused to accept visits from his wife and five children for two years, prompting Sinn Féin to accuse the British government of maintaining "a worsening regime that is damaging physically and psychologically". Lawyers for the defendants successfully argued that an article in the Evening Standard prejudiced the trial as it contained photographs of Magee and two other defendants and described them as "terrorists", as an order had been made at the start of the trial preventing any reference to the background and previous convictions of the defendants. He was released from prison in late 1999 under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement, and returned to live with his family in Tralee. On 8 March 2000 Magee was arrested on the outstanding Supreme Court extradition warrant from 1991, and remanded to Mountjoy Prison. The following day he was granted bail at the High Court in Dublin, after launching a legal challenge to his extradition. This followed a statement from Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Peter Mandelson saying that "it is clearly anomalous to pursue the extradition of people who appear to qualify for early release under the Good Friday Agreement scheme, and who would, on making a successful application to the Sentence Review Commissioners, have little if any of their original prison sentence to serve".