page_title: 1996 Manchester bombing
section_title: Investigation
hierarchical_section_title: 1996 Manchester bombing / Investigation
caption_attribution_description: In the Museum of Science and Industry. This traffic light was recovered from the corner of Cross Street and Market Street in Manchester after the IRA bomb explosion on June 15, 1996.
context_page_description: The 1996 Manchester bombing was an attack carried out by the Provisional Irish Republican Army on Saturday 15 June 1996. The IRA detonated a 1,500-kilogram lorry bomb on Corporation Street in the centre of Manchester, England. It was the biggest bomb detonated in Great Britain since the Second World War, it targeted the city's infrastructure and economy and caused significant damage, estimated by insurers at £700 million – only surpassed by the 2001 September 11 attacks and the 1993 Bishopsgate bombing in terms of financial cost.
  The IRA had sent telephoned warnings about 90 minutes before the bomb detonated. At least 75,000 people were evacuated from the area, but the bomb squad were unable to defuse the bomb in time. More than 200 people were injured but there were no fatalities despite the strength of the bomb, which has been largely credited to the fast response of emergency services in evacuating the city centre before the bomb could explode. At the time, England was hosting the Euro '96 football championships and a Russia vs. Germany match was scheduled to take place in Manchester the following day.
context_section_description: In an effort to trace the route of the Ford van, police examined CCTV footage from every major road and motorway taken in England within two days of the bombing. Footage revealed that the van was driven south along the M1 motorway into London on the Friday afternoon before the attack. It was seen again heading north along the motorway at 7:40 pm, accompanied by the Ford Granada. Detectives surmised that the van had been loaded with explosives in London and that the Granada was intended to be the getaway vehicle. The truck was last recorded travelling east along the M62 motorway towards Manchester at 8:31 am on the morning of the explosion.
  Police in Manchester were aware that their Metropolitan Police colleagues in London were investigating a suspected IRA unit based in the capital, and wondered whether the London unit was responsible for the Manchester bombing. On 15 July, Metropolitan police arrested six men suspected of IRA membership: Donal Gannon, John Crawley, Gerard Hanratty, Robert Morrow, Patrick Martin, and Francis Rafferty. Each was tried and convicted of "conspiracy to cause explosions at National Grid electricity stations", and sentenced to 35 years in jail. Police in Manchester meanwhile worked to establish if the men were also responsible for the Manchester bomb.
  Their investigation was led by Detective Chief Inspector Gordon Mutch of the Greater Manchester Police (GMP), "astonishingly ... the only person ever charged with a criminal offence in connection with the Manchester bomb". The van's last registered owner told police that he had sold it to a dealer in Peterborough, who had in turn sold the van on to a man calling himself Tom Fox, two weeks before the bombing. After the purchase price was delivered in cash by a taxi driver, the dealer was instructed to take the van to a nearby lorry park, and leave it there with the keys and documents hidden inside.
  On checking records of telephone calls made to the dealer, the police found that some had been made from a mobile phone registered in Ireland, and on further checking the records of that phone it appeared that the calls were made from locations consistent with the known whereabouts of the Ford truck. One call was to a known IRA member. The phone was last used at 9:23 am on the morning of the bombing, just three minutes after the bombers had parked their truck in Corporation Street. On 27 June, the phone's registered owner reported that it had been stolen 17 days earlier, but the police felt they had gathered enough evidence to bring a prosecution against the six IRA men held in London.
  At a meeting attended by the commander of Special Branch in Manchester, a GMP assistant chief constable and a "senior officer" from the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), it was decided, for reasons never made public, not to present the findings of the investigation to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), the body responsible for undertaking criminal prosecutions in England. The three may have felt that as the IRA suspects were already in police custody they were no longer a threat, or that to pursue the case against them may have jeopardised ongoing undercover operations. It was not until 1998 that the police finally sent their file to the CPS, who decided not to prosecute.
caption: A damaged traffic light that stood on the corner of the junction between Cross Street and Market Street at the time of the explosion, now in the Museum of Science and Industry
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