Death On The Rock, SAS execute IRA cell in Gibraltar, This Week, Thames Television (1988)

Death On The Rock, SAS execute IRA cell in Gibraltar, Thames Television (1988)

YouTube Views before they killed off my PublicEnquiry channel: 872,837
Published on Apr 23, 2011

SEE ALSO: Death On The Rock researcher Alison Cahn: whatever happened to UK investigative journalism?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoqnyJHdS3Y

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Not just the death of British justice but the death of British investigative TV too!

The back story with this film is it illustrates how low BBC & UK TV has sunk since 1988.

Thames TV lost the London ITV franchise after this film was broadcast. Death on the Rock was the title of a documentary in the current affairs series This Week, made by Thames Television and broadcast on the ITV network on 28 April 1988. The programme investigated the incident, on Sunday 6 March 1988, when three members of the IRA, sent to Gibraltar on an active service mission, were shot and killed by members of British special forces. The incident, and subsequently the programme about it, became controversial as a result of uncertainty and conflicting evidence about the manner in which the killing was carried out and the degree to which it was an "execution" with no attempted arrest. The programme interviewed witnesses who claimed to have heard no prior warning given by the SAS troops and to have seen the shooting as one carried out "in cold blood." Furthermore, the defence that the IRA team might, if allowed time, have had the capacity to trigger by remote control a car bomb in the main street, was also subject to criticism, including that from an Army bomb disposal expert.

Claiming that its transmission prior to the official inquest was an impediment to justice, the then foreign secretary, Sir Geoffrey Howe, attempted to stop the programme being broadcast by writing to the chairman of the Independent Broadcasting Authority, Lord Thomson of Monifieth. Lord Thomson refused to prevent transmission noting that "the issues as we see them relate to free speech and free inquiry which underpin individual liberty in a democracy." Following transmission, there was some criticism of the programme's investigative stance in the press (e.g. "Storm at SAS Telly Trial" The Sun; "Fury over SAS 'Trial by TV'," Daily Mail; "TV Slur on the SAS," Daily Star). Subsequently, a number of papers, notably The Sunday Times and The Sun, attempted to show not only that the programme's procedures of inquiry were faulty but that the character of some of its witnesses was dubious (in one case, this latter charge resulted in a successful libel action being brought).

Such was the debate which developed around the programme, intensified by one of its witnesses subsequently repudiating his testimony in it, that an independent inquiry was conducted at the behest of Thames Television.

Thames