Loughgall, 8 May 1987: The Ambush That Ended the East Tyrone Brigade

Loughgall, County Armagh. Friday, 8 May 1987, at about twenty past seven in the evening. The village, home to only a few hundred people, sits amid the orchard country roughly eight miles east of Dungannon. Its Royal Ulster Constabulary station on the main street is an unremarkable target, operating only part-time—from nine to eleven in the morning and again between five and seven in the evening—and by that Friday night it is expected to be empty. At the edge of the village, a blue Toyota HiAce van appears, followed at the slow pace of farm machinery by a stolen JCB digger taken from a nearby farm just hours earlier. Resting in the digger's front bucket is an oil drum packed with explosives, with estimates placing the charge somewhere between two hundred and four hundred pounds, while one of the men aboard lights the fuse. The men inside the van and on the digger are members of the Provisional IRA's East Tyrone Brigade.