Records released recently by the FBI relating to several official visits by Queen Elizabeth II to the United States in the 1980s and 1990s reveal threats and a potential plan to kill the sovereign.
Among these documents, published on the FBI website, a note concerns in particular the trip made by Elizabeth II and her husband, Prince Philip, to the west coast of the United States in 1983.
According to information obtained by the San Francisco police via a source close to Irish nationalist circles, a man who claimed that “his daughter had been killed in Northern Ireland by a rubber bullet”, issued the plan “to harm the Queen Elizabeth”.
He would do so “either by dropping an object from the Golden Gate Bridge onto the Royal Yacht Britannia as it passed underneath, or by attempting to kill the Queen during her visit to Yosemite National Park.”
Four years earlier, in 1979, the paramilitary group Irish Republican Army had killed in a bomb attack Lord Louis Mountbatten, the cousin of Elizabeth II, in the midst of troubles which saw Republicans and Northern Irish Unionists clash. .
Another note, relating to a state visit by the queen in 1991, mentions threats from Irish groups to disrupt events the monarch was to attend, such as a baseball game and a reception at the White House.
Another document from 1989 states that although no specific threats were made against the Queen, “the possibility of threats from the Irish Republican Army (IRA) against the British Monarchy is always present”.
The queen, who died last September at the age of 96, was the subject of several assassination attempts.
In 1970, suspected IRA sympathizers attempted to derail his train west of Sydney, Australia, and in 1981 the IRA planned a bombing during a visit to northern Scotland.
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