An FBI file related to the late Queen Elizabeth II’s visit to the US reveals a potential plot to kill her, The Guardian reports.
The document, available in the FBI’s online repository, describes intelligence provided to federal agents about a threat to Queen’s life in California 40 years ago.
In February and March 1983, Queen Elizabeth and her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, made an official visit to the West Coast of the United States. The file states that the phone call came from “a man who claimed his daughter had been killed in Northern Ireland with a rubber bullet”.
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“This man further claims that he will attempt to harm Queen Elizabeth and will do so either by dropping some object from the Golden Gate Bridge onto the royal yacht Britannia as she passes under it, or by attempting to kill the Queen Elizabeth when she visited Yosemite National Park.
The dossier mentions a club which “has a popular reputation as a republican bar and is frequented by Provisional Irish Republican Army sympathizers”.
Another document, among more than 100 pages released online by the FBI, relates to the Queen’s state visit to the US in 1991, revealing concerns that Irish groups planned to protest the monarch’s attendance at a baseball game as well as event at the White House. The information comes from an Irish newspaper in Philadelphia called the Irish Edition.
The file says: “The article states that anti-British sentiment has been greatly exacerbated by the well-publicized injustices meted out to the Birmingham Six by the corrupt English judicial system, as well as the recent brutal killings of unarmed Irish nationalists in the Six Counties by loyalist squadrons of death”.
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“Although the article contained no threats against the president or the queen, the statements could be considered inflammatory. The article stated that an Irish group had booked a large number of tickets for the grandstand,” the FBI said.
A separate file among the documents, dated 1989, said that while the FBI was not aware of specific plans against the Queen, “the possibility of threats against the British monarchy always exists from the Irish Republican Army”.
The Queen’s second cousin, Lord Mountbatten, was killed in an IRA bomb attack in County Sligo, Ireland in 1979.
