Michael Hayes has emerged as the person who was behind the assassination of King Charles’s beloved great-uncle and India’s last governor-general Louis Mountbatten.
Speaking to the Daily Mail, Hayes, now himself an aged person, claimed that he, not Thomas McMahon, was behind the assassination of Earl Louis Mountbatten in August 1979.
Hayes said he was an ex-Irish Republican Army (IRA) commander and Thomas McMahon’s ‘commanding officer’.
The IRA killed Lord Mountbatten because they opposed Northern Ireland being part of England and wanted to send a strong message.
Hayes, a grandfather who lives alone in Dublin, 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 further added.
Thomas McMahon was the only IRA member who was convicted of the crime and was arrested on the day of the blast and was jailed for life but he was released later in 1998 after 19 years in prison under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement.
Hayes said that it was he who planned the murder and was able to do so because he was an explosives expert. Lord Mountbatten was killed when McMahon and other IRA terrorists detonated a 50-pound bomb hidden on his fishing vessel Shadow V. Hayes’ name came up in the list of suspects but he was never prosecuted.
Mountbatten was a World War II hero and second cousin of Queen Elizabeth II, was spending the day with his family in Donegal Bay off Ireland’s northwest coast when the bomb exploded. He was also a mentor to Prince Philip and King Charles.
Three others were killed in the attack, including Mountbatten’s teenage grandson, Nicholas. Among the dead were also another teenager.
“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 said.
When asked about the dead teenagers, 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 was quoted as saying by the Daily Mail.
Doreen Brabourne, 83, Nicholas’s grandmother and crewman Paul Maxwell, 15, of Enniskillen were killed alongside Mountbatten and his grandson Nicholas, 14.
King Charles III, then Prince Charles, loved his great-uncle Louis Mountbatten and affectionately called him ‘Uncle Dickie’ and his death affected Charles deeply. His death sent him into a state of ‘agony, disbelief, a kind of wretched numbness’, the royal who was 31-year-old at the time, wrote in his diary.
If the Irish police and Director of Public Prosecution decide to prosecute Hayes, they can, the report said citing experts.
Ian Paisley Jr, the Democratic Unionist Party MP for North Antrim in Ulster, urged the Garda Síochána, the police service in the Republic of Ireland, to ‘immediately’ investigate Hayes.
“No, I fought a war, I was justified. Blowing up Mountbatten? No,” Hayes said, adding that he does not fear prosecution, nor does he regret killing Mountbatten.
“I think we would require justice, not revenge. It’s something that never goes away,” Mary Hornsey, 84, mother of young victim Paul Maxwell, said, adding that she would welcome a police probe into the claims.
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