Birmingham pub bombings
1974 CE.
Shown on the map at 52.480°, -1.903°.
On 21 November 1974, bombs exploded in two pubs in Birmingham, England, killing 21 people and injuring 182 others. The Provisional IRA never officially admitted responsibility for the bombings, although a former senior officer of the organisation confessed to their involvement in 2014. In 2017, one of the alleged perpetrators, Michael Hayes, also claimed that the intention of the bombings had not been to harm civilians, and that their deaths had been caused by an unintentional delay in delivering an advance telephone warning to security services. Six Irishmen were arrested within hours of the blasts and, in 1975, sentenced to life imprisonment for the bombings. The men—who became known as the Birmingham Six—maintained their innocence and insisted police had coerced them into signing false confessions through severe physical and psychological abuse. After 16 years in prison, and a lengthy campaign, their convictions were declared unsafe and unsatisfactory, and quashed by the Court of Appeal in 1991.
Text from the Wikipedia article Birmingham pub bombings, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.