Ex-Army commander claims he ‘blew up’ Lord Mountbatten in 1979

An ex-Irish Republican Army (IRA) commander named Michael Hayes has claimed that he masterminded assassination of Lord Mountbatten in August 1979, according to a report by Daily Mail.

Lord Earl Louis Mountbatten, a World War II hero and second cousin of Queen Elizabeth II, was India’s Last Viceroy.

Hayes claimed that he, not Thomas McMahon, who was convicted of the crime in November 1979, was behind the killing of Lord Mountbatten.

McMahon was jailed for life but he was released later in 1998 after 19 years in prison under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement.

As per the report, Michael Hayes said: “Yes, I blew him up. McMahon put it on his boat … I planned everything, I am commander in chief”.

“I blew up Earl Mountbatten in Sligo, but I had a justification, he’d come to my country… Look at the Famine … are we to forget that? The Black and Tans? He came to my country and murdered my people and I fought back. I hit them back,” he added.

The Irish Republican Army had killed Lord Mountbatten because they opposed Northern Ireland being part of England.

“I blew up Earl Mountbatten. 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,” Hayes was quoted as saying by the Daily Mail

A 1979 report on McMahon’s conviction in the Washington Post said how gardaí were keeping open the Mountbatten file in the belief that up to seven others were involved in the plot.

Hayes was the deputy head of the IRA’s England department in the late 1970s and 1980s.

Mountbatten, a grand-uncle to King Charles III, was killed when McMahon and other IRA members detonated a 50-pound bomb hidden on his fishing vessel Shadow V.

Also killed were Mountbatten’s 14-year-old grandson Nicholas Knatchbull; Doreen Knatchbull, Nicholas’s grandmother and Paul Maxwell, a teenage boy from Enniskillen serving as crew.

On teenagers’ death, Hayes said that they were “casualties of war”. “Yes, I regret that, that wasn’t meant to happen. I’m a father. I’m not made of stone. I was sickened, I cried. Them children were not supposed to be on the boat in the first place.”

Hayes also said that he was not behind the November 1974 Birmingham bombings.