I was Mountbatten bomb mastermind, boasts IRA man

Ex-IRA commander boasts of being the explosives expert behind the 1979 assasination of the King’s beloved great-uncle.

Earl Mountbatten was on a family fishing trip when he was murdered. Picture: News Corp

A former IRA commander has claimed that he was the mastermind behind the assassination of Earl Mountbatten of Burma, the King’s great-uncle.

Mountbatten was murdered in 1979 when a 23kg bomb blew up his boat off the coast at Classiebawn Castle, Co Sligo, his summer home in the Republic of Ireland. Now, 45 years after the killing, Michael Hayes has boasted that he was the explosives expert behind the mission and that Tom McMahon, the man jailed for the murder, was under his command.

The claim is likely to cause heartache for the King who previously wrote of his “agony, disbelief and wretched numbness” over the death of Mountbatten, whom he knew affectionately as Uncle Dickie.

The bombing claimed three other lives: Mountbatten’s grandson Nicholas Knatchbull, 14, Baroness Brabourne, 83, Nicholas’s grandmother, and Paul Maxwell, 15, a crewman.

“Yes, I blew him up. McMahon put it on his boat ... I planned everything, I am commander in chief,” Hayes, a grandfather living in Dublin, told the Mail on Sunday. “I blew up Earl Mountbatten in Sligo, but I had a justification . . . He came to my country and murdered my people and I fought back.

“Tom McMahon, he was only a participant. I am an explosives expert, I am renowned. I was trained in Libya. I trained there as an explosives expert.”

Dublin grandfather Michael Hayes, who claimed he was an IRA bombmaker, said Mountbatten ‘came to my country and murdered my people and I fought back’. Picture: The Daily Telegraph

Another accomplice, Francis McGirl, who was arrested but later acquitted, “made a bollocks of it”, Hayes said. McGirl died in a farming accident in 1995. McMahon was released under the Good Friday agreement.

It is understood that there is no bar to Hayes being investigated and prosecuted. Asked if he feared prosecution, Hayes said: “No, I fought a war, I was justified.”

The two teenage boys who died were “casualties of war” but Hayes said that he regretted their deaths: “That wasn’t meant to happen. I’m a father. I’m not made of stone. I was sickened, I cried.”

Ian Paisley Jr, a Democratic Unionist Party MP in Northern Ireland, called for the police in the Republic to “immediately” investigate Hayes.

“The sensational, shocking and bloodcurdling statement by a self-confessed, cold-blooded murderer ought to be immediately investigated by the police and the man brought to justice,” he told the Mail on Sunday.

Queen Elizabeth ll, Princess Anne, Queen Elizabeth, The Queen Mother and Prince Charles, Prince of Wales stand on the steps of Westminster Abbey as the coffin of Lord Mountbatten is carried out by soldiers following his funeral service on September 05, 1979 in London, England. Picture: Getty

Mary Hornsey, 84, the mother of Maxwell, said she would welcome an investigation. “I think we would require justice, not revenge,” she said, adding that the loss of her son “is something that never goes away”.

Buckingham Palace declined to comment. The King shook hands with Gerry Adams, president of Irish republican party Sinn Fein, in Galway in 2015 after visiting the scene of his great uncle’s murder.

A spokesman for An Garda Siochana, the Republic’s police, said: “As a matter of public record, two persons were prosecuted in respect of the murder of Lord Mountbatten. One individual was acquitted and a second individual served a sentence of imprisonment and was subsequently released pursuant to the Good Friday agreement.”

Hayes was named as one of four men behind the 1974 Birmingham bombings but he had never previously linked himself to the Mountbatten murder.

The Times