Three decades after wrongly jailing 11 people for IRA bombs at English pubs, the government apologised on Wednesday to the victims of one of Britain’s most notorious miscarriages of justice.Four of them—the ‘Guildford Four’—achieved international fame when their wrongful 15-year jailing was dramatised in the 1993 film In The Name of The Father’. PM Tony Blair met some of the former prisoners in London to offer a personal mea culpa on behalf of the state. ‘‘I am very sorry that they were subject to such an ordeal and such an injustice,’’ he said in a brief television statement. ‘‘They deserve to be completely and publicly exonerated.’’The Guildford Four and Maguire Seven were blamed for 1974 bombs in bars in the southern towns of Guildford and Woolwich. Appeal courts overturned the convictions of the four in 1989, and the seven in 1991, amid allegations of falsified evidence and confessions obtained under coercion.The bombs came at the height of the Irish Republican Army’s attacks on mainland Britain as part of its fight to unite Northern Ireland with the Irish Republic to the South.Gerry Conlon—the best-known of the Guildford Four—whose father died in custody—told reporters in London the lack of a top-level apology until Wednesday, had worsened their suffering. Conlon thanked Blair, but expressed bitterness at the 11’s ordeal and appealed for similar closure in other cases.‘‘It’s a Who’s Who of victims of miscarriages of justice,’’ he said. ‘‘There’s so many to name. The obvious ones are the Birmingham Six, the Tottenham Three, the Cardiff Three, the Bridgwater Four. it goes on and it goes on,’’ he said, referring to other famous IRA and race cases. —Reuters
