Northern Ireland (NI): McAliskey investigation dropped
01 September 2000
In July, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) dropped an investigation into Roisin McAliskey, admitting that there was no chance of a successful prosecution against her for participating in the IRA's bombing of a British Army base in Osnabruck, Germany, in June 1996. No one was injured in the attack. Roisin, the daughter of Bernadette McAliskey the former Republican MP for Mid-Ulster, was arrested five months after the incident when the German authorities claimed to have found her fingerprints at the scene; they also said that she had been identified by a witness. She was taken to Holloway prison in north London to await a decision on her extradition to Germany before being transferred to Belmarsh high-security prison and then back to Holloway. She gave birth to a daughter while in custody.
The case against her, described as "puny" by her solicitor, was fatally flawed when it was demonstrated that the fingerprint could have transported to Germany from the UK innocently. The case was further undermined when the eyewitness retracted his evidence, claiming that he had been pressured into making a statement. Roisin had witnesses who said that she had been at home and at work at the time of the bomb attack. The Home Secretary issued a statement in March 1998 saying that he would not order her extradition to Germany because it would be "unjust and oppressive".
Notwithstanding the paucity of evidence against her she was detained in prison for over fifteen months and suffered from brittle bone disease as a consequence of the conditions in which she was held. During her imprisonment, and despite her pregnancy, she was strip-searched on 75 occasions. She underwent psychiatric treatment at the Maudsley hospital in London for post-natal depression and suffered severe post-traumatic stress. Describing her ordeal, solicitor Gareth Peirce said: "It is incomprehensible that the CPS apparently have devoted time and public resources at this late stage in ascertaining what was always obvious."