Danny McNamee
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Gilbert "Danny" McNamee is a former electronic engineer from Crossmaglen, Northern Ireland, who was wrongly convicted in 1987 of bomb-making for the Irish Republican Army's Hyde Park bombing of 1982. At the trial he denied even having sympathy for the IRA, and no evidence was presented at his original trial that he had any paramilitary links. However, his fingerprint was found on electronic circuits in an arms cache that was linked to the Hyde Park bombing. At his trial he explained that he may have handled the circuits when working for a previous employer, which he did not know had IRA connections. His conviction was overturned in 1998, because of other, much more prominent, fingerprints on the same circuits, belonging to known IRA bomb-maker Desmond Ellis, which were not disclosed at McNamee's original trial. Supporters of the campaign to clear his name included the comedian Jeremy Hardy. But in a powerful rider to their decision, the three judges stated: “the Crown makes a strong case that the appellant [McNamee] was guilty of a conspiracy to cause explosions.” They added that despite the quashing of convictions, “It does not follow that the appellant is innocent of the charge brought against him or that he has served 11 years’ imprisonment for a crime which it has been found he did not commit.
During his 11 years in prison, however, McNamee was accepted as an IRA prisoner. In September 1994, he was one of five IRA men who escaped from Whitemoor Jail, shooting and wounding a prison guard as they did so, before being captured two hours later.
In Feb. 1999, McNamee read the IRA Roll of Honour at the Burns and Moloey commemoration and the following month he sat with the Caraher family during the trial of Vol. Michael Caraher, and other member’s of South Armagh Brigade’s sniper’s team [1].
