LONDON (AP) — Three victims of bombings in England by the Irish Republican Army brought an end Friday to their damages claim against former Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams.
On what was to be the last day of the two-week civil trial in the U.K.'s High Court in London, the three men's lawyer Anne Studd said the claim would be discontinued after “proceedings developed overnight." She said the development was related to an argument around “abuse of process."
Adams was being sued in London's High Court for allegedly being directly responsible and complicit for decisions by the Provisional IRA to detonate bombs in England in 1973 and 1996. He was being sued for a symbolic 1 pound ($1.34) in damages.
Adams, 77, who gave evidence in the trial but who was not in court Friday, released a statement soon after the case was dropped, welcoming the decision by the claimants
“I attended the civil case out of respect for them,” he said in a statement. "This decision brings to an emphatic end, a case that should never have been brought.”
Adams is one of the most influential figures of Northern Ireland's decades of conflict. He led the IRA-linked political party Sinn Féin between 1983 and 2018 and helped broker the 1998 Good Friday peace accord. He has always denied being an IRA member, though some former colleagues have said he was one of its leaders.
The trio claimed Adams was a member of the IRA's decision-making Army Council and was as responsible as the men who planted the explosives during “the Troubles,” the three decades of violence involving Irish republican and British loyalist militants and U.K. soldiers. Some 3,600 people were killed, most in Northern Ireland, though the IRA also set off bombs in England.
John Clark, a police officer, had shrapnel lodged in his head and hand from the 1973 Old Bailey courthouse bombing in London. Jonathan Ganesh suffered psychologically from the 1996 London Docklands bombing. Barry Laycock was left 50% disabled, suffered emotionally and struggled financially from the 1996 Arndale shopping center bombing in Manchester.
In their evidence, the three men said they had not brought claims earlier because they did not realise they could do so, could not afford it, were suffering from mental or physical injuries and feared violent reprisals.
Adams was never charged with the bombings or even arrested on suspicion of being connected to them. He was charged with being an IRA member in 1978, but the case was later dropped because of a lack of evidence.
Adams won a 100,000 ($116,000) libel verdict last year against the BBC over a claim in a television documentary that he authorized the killing of an informant inside the Irish republican movement.
