Irish fighters beat London extradition attempt
BY JIM ALTENBERG
SAN FRANCISCO--"I'm having a beer and I'm shaking," a jubilant Terry Kirby told the Irish Herald upon learning that the long battle against London's drive to send him, Kevin Barry Artt, and Pol Brennan back to Northern Ireland was over. British Secretary for Northern Ireland Peter Mandelson announced September 29 that London was ending its eight-year drive to extradite the three Irish republican fighters as part of the prisoner release sections of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.
Kirby, Brennan, and Artt were among 38 republican prisoners who escaped together from the notorious H-Block wing of the Long Kesh maximum security prison outside of Belfast in 1983. The three men, along with Jimmy Smyth, a fourth republican fighter who was part of the 1983 escape, were living in California when they were arrested by the FBI between 1992 and 1996. The British government issued extradition warrants for the four and demanded that they be sent back to Northern Ireland and to prison.
The H-Block Four, as they became known, won wide support as they challenged London's extradition drive as well as their imprisonment in federal jails in California. Smyth was deported to Northern Ireland in 1996. After spending 14 months in jail, Kirby, Brennan, and Artt were released when a federal appeals court overturned a lower court's extradition order and set a new trial date. Bail was set for Kirby at $1 million; for Artt and Brennan, $500,000 each.
Kirby noted that the fight was still not over. The three have not yet received formal notification from the U.S. government that proceedings to deport them have been lifted. They have also applied for political asylum in the United States, but their applications were put on hold pending resolution of Britain's extradition warrant. Kirby has not been able to work legally for some time.
Mandelson's announcement "will be welcome news" for those "who have been fighting extradition from the United States," Alex Maskey, a Sinn Fein official in West Belfast, said. He noted, however, that Mandelson's action applied only to those prisoners who had not completed actual prison sentences. Extradition warrants remain out for those who had escaped while awaiting trial or sentencing. Mandelson himself noted that the three men would likely have already qualified for early release from prison in Northern Ireland. "The public interest would be best served," Maskey said, if Britain now cleared up "all the anomalies arising from its penal policy."
The last republican fighters were released from the H-Blocks September 29. With the transfer to other prisons of some pro-British loyalist prisoners, as well as one republican, the hated H-Blocks are now empty for the first time since 1971.
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