One of the IRA's most notorious active service units, responsible for at least 16 murders during a 14-month terror campaign in south-east England, will be freed from Ireland's Portlaoise prison next Wednesday, the latest of the paramilitaries to benefit from the Good Friday Agreement.
The Balcombe Street Gang, named after the London street where they were involved in a five-day siege, were never charged with the Guildford and Woolwich pub bombings which killed seven people in autumn 1974, though several of them confessed.
Four innocent people, who became known as the Guildford Four, spent 15 years in jail for the crime before being freed at the Court of Appeal in October 1989. Another seven, who served long periods in prison for bomb-making off-ences linked to the attacks, have also been exonerated.
The gang members Hugh Doherty, aged 49, brother of Sinn Fein vice-president Pat Doherty, and Eddie Butler, 50, Harry Duggan, 47, and Martin O'Connell, 47, were given 47 life sentences at the Old Bailey in February 1977.
The men attended a Sinn Fein annual conference last May, having been called to vote on the Good Friday Agreement and been given parole by the Irish government to go to the event. The tumultuous scenes as they took the platform badly dented Unionist support for the deal.
The gang had only been transferred from an English prison a week earlier. They are on extended Easter parole and are due to return to Portlaoise, 50 miles west of Dublin, on Wednesday, for the formalities allowing their release on licence. The Government had no say on the parole or release date, which was announced yesterday, though this has not been the case for some prisoners repatriated to Northern Ireland.
Under the agreement, an-other member of the same IRA active service unit left Portlaoise yesterday. Liam Quinn, aged 51, shot dead an off-duty policeman in Hammersmith, west London. The officer, Stephen Tibble, had been in the force only three weeks. Quinn escaped and went to live in San Francisco. He lost a long battle against extradition from the United States, and returned to Brit-ain to face trial. He was jailed for life in February 1988 with a recommended minimum sentence of 30 years.
A sixth man, John Kinsella, was released from jail yesterday. Aged 55, he was serving a 16-year sentence for offences connected with the IRA bombing of the Warrington gasworks in 1993, in which a man was killed. He has long protested his innocence of any involvement.
The six released prisoners named yesterday brings to 24 the number freed in the Irish Republic under the accelerated release programme. An-other 21 are eligible.
While Quinn is released after 11 years for the murder of a British police officer, the Irish government has ex-cluded from the amnesty scheme four IRA men in-volved in the killing of Jerry McCabe, a member of the Gardai (Irish police force). The 53-year-old officer was shot dead during an abortive IRA robbery in Ardare, Co Limerick, in June 1996.
So far, 255 convicted terrorists have been freed under the scheme in Northern Ireland, and about 230 who qualify for the release scheme are still in the Maze prison. All the terrorists remaining in jail in July 2000 will be freed, provided they are members of groups agreeing to a long-term ceasefire.
The Balcombe Street Gang's reign came to an end in December 1975. Police on duty to counter their campaign, spotted the men opening fire at a Mayfair restaurant that had been bombed three weeks earlier. After a chase, they were cornered in the Marlyebone flat of John and Shelia Matthews. They gave themselves up after138 hours.
The gang's activities had intensified in the previous five months, following the breakdown of a long IRA ceasefire. The four men were convicted of eight killings and up to 50 bombings and shootings in public areas. Among those they murdered was father-of-four Gordon Hamilton-Fairley, a professor and cancer expert, who worked at St Bartholomew's hospital. He was killed by a car bomb in October 1975.
They also shot dead Ross McWhirter, the television personality and co-founder of the Guinness Book of World Rec-ords, at his home in Enfield, north London. He had offered a £50,000 reward for their capture. Roger Goad, a bomb disposal expert, died while attempting to defuse a bomb outside a Kensington shop. The gang admitted it had set out to murder an explosives expert, and said Captain Goad had failed to carry out proper safety precautions.
They were also believed to be considering an audacious attack on a London reservoir. There were two plans: to poison drinking water, and to flood part of the London Underground system.
O'Connell, eschewing the IRA's policy at the time of refusing to recognise the British courts, told the trial that three of the gang, along with IRA man Brendan O'Dowd, already jailed, had bombed Guildford and Woolwich. O'Con- nell said the Director of Public Prosecutions had been told about their involvement in December 1975, but had not acted upon it.