The Independent Archive: Screams of the dying drive rescuers to tears

23 September 1989

Yesterday IRA bombs killed 10 people at the Royal Marine School of Music in Deal, Kent. Heather Mills, Nick Cohen, Rosie Waterhouse and Jack O'Sullivan report

WITH BARE and bloodied hands the marines tore at the rubble. Underneath their friends lay dead and dying, their screams and moans reducing the rescuers to tears as they dug.

"They are my mates. I don't know who is dead and who isn't," one said as he was led away to make room for the firemen and their equipment.

Shouts for silence temporarily halted the frantic digging as the rescuers, with sonic listening devices and thermal imaging equipment, searched for signs of life under the rubble. They angrily waved away three noisy helicopters hovering overhead.

Broken and shattered bodies were lifted away as firemen made a human chain to clear the rubble. By late afternoon they were still searching for one marine who was unaccounted for. People gathered in the streets, staring in disbelief.

"Bastards. How could they do this?" Janet Minnock said as she comforted her two-year-old son in the wreckage of her house across the road from the barracks. Moments earlier, like her neighbours, she had been listening to the Royal Marines Band at their usual early-morning practice on the parade ground.

The silence following the end of the music was suddenly shattered as a tremendous explosion lifted the roof off the north block, before the two-storey building crumbled in a vast pall of smoke, crushing those beneath. The blast could be heard two miles away from the small Cinque port.

Heather Hackett, 26, was standing at her kitchen window holding her four- month-old baby. Her sons - Ben, three, and Joshua, two - were at her side. "I looked up from the sink and I just saw the whole building explode. I told the boys to run and as Joshua turned a sliver of glass embedded itself in his back.

"The bang was so loud I thought the whole house was coming in. At first I thought for sure Joshua had been seriously injured. There was blood coming out of his back."

Joshua was treated at hospital and later returned home.

Last night Campbell Road, which adjoins the base, was sealed off as police conducted house-to-house inquiries. Inside the barracks, the death toll of those caught inside the recreation block was rising.

The wounded had flash burns, crush and head injuries. One of them, Sgt David Duxbury-Williams, 35, a patient at Deal hospital, said: "Everybody believes in something, and if they believe in something enough I suppose it's fair enough. I am not bitter. I am trying to look at this objectively rather than be emotional. That will probably come later on."

He was one of 150 people at the Royal Marines School of Music, which trains young recruits who want to play in the seven Royal Marines bands. Their dark blue uniforms and distinctive white helmets are the public face of the marines.

Although there was no official confirmation that the blast was the work of terrorists until after the IRA had claimed a victory for "peace", police at the scene were immediately treating it as a bomb, sending a forensic team from Scotland Yard's Anti-Terrorist Squad, and clearing the area for fear of secondary explosions.

At the devastated barracks Tom King, the Secretary of State for Defence, pledged that the atrocity would not halt the battle against terrorism. Mr King said the "Godfathers of Northern Ireland" and others who committed such murders had to realise that, whether they were committed in England or Germany, the fight against terrorists would go on. "The real evil of these murders is the people who commit them, the Godfathers who send them, know that they actually achieve nothing.

"Terrorism is not going to win. We will find the people responsible for this outrage, sooner or later, as we have already found some of those responsible for earlier outrages and they will be brought to justice."

Dean Bradford, who was escorted by police through the security cordons to lay the first floral tributes beneath the Royal Marines' insignia at the main entrance, said: "We all have friends from the barracks."

From the Home News pages of `The Independent', Saturday