Joe Doherty

Joe Doherty (born 20 January 1955) is a former volunteer in the Belfast Brigade of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) who escaped during his 1981 trial for killing a member of the Special Air Service (SAS) in 1980. He was arrested in the United States in 1983, and became a cause célèbre while fighting an ultimately unsuccessful nine-year legal battle against extradition and deportation, with a street corner in New York City being named after him. A first season episode of Law & Order entitled The Troubles was based on his case.

The son of a docker, Doherty was born on 20 January 1955 in New Lodge, Belfast. Doherty left school aged 14 and began work on the docks and as an apprentice plumber, before being arrested in 1972 on his seventeenth birthday under the Special Powers Act. Doherty was interned on the prison ship HMS Maidstone and Long Kesh Detention Centre, and while interned heard of the events of Bloody Sunday in Derry, where 14 civil rights protesters were shot dead by the British Army. This led to him joining the IRA after he was released in June 1972. In the mid-1970s Doherty was convicted of possession of explosives and sentenced to six years imprisonment in Long Kesh. He was released in December 1979.

After his release, Doherty became part of a four-man active service unit nicknamed the "M60 gang" due to their use of an M60 heavy machine gun, along with Angelo Fusco and Paul Magee. On 9 April 1980 the unit lured the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) into an ambush on Stewartstown Road, killing one constable and wounding two others. On 2 May the unit were planning another attack and had taken over a house on Antrim Road, when an eight-man patrol from the SAS arrived in plain clothes, after being alerted by the RUC. A car carrying three SAS members went to the rear of the house, and another car carrying five SAS members arrived at the front of the house. As the SAS members at the front of the house exited the car, the IRA unit opened fire with the M60 machine gun from an upstairs window, hitting Captain Herbert Westmacott in the head and shoulder. Westmacott, who was killed instantly, was the highest-ranking member of the SAS killed in Northern Ireland. The remaining SAS members at the front, armed with Colt Commando automatic rifles, submachine guns and Browning pistols, returned fire but were forced to withdraw. Magee was apprehended by the SAS members at the rear of the house while attempting to prepare the IRA unit's escape in a transit van, while the other three IRA members remained inside the house. More members of the security forces were deployed to the scene, and after a brief siege the remaining members of the IRA unit surrendered.

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