The police and security services are “virtually defenceless” against the IRA’s current tactic of using bomb threats to disrupt the transport network, terrorism experts believe. At its most simple the strategy, which is intended to produce chaos and disruption with little risk of loss of life, can involve one terrorist telephoning a number of targets from anywhere in the world.
The IRA know that as long as the calls include a known codeword, the emergency authorities are certain to respond.As Dr Michael Page, of Bradford University’s Department of Peace Studies, explained: “It’s very difficult to protect transport infrastructure. You cannot have every signal box and motorway bridge manned or monitored. The system is virtually indefensible.”We are a free, open, democratic country, so we don’t have vast numbers of police that can be positioned everywhere – its virtually impossible to deal with this.”However, the terrorist tactics do have weaknesses that can be exploited. To ensure their actions obtain maximum publicity and to maintain credibility, the terrorists need to plant some bombs, such as the device that went off in Leeds last Friday. It is while they are being placed or during recognisance that they risk being identified.The use of closed circuit television cameras and enhanced public awareness of suspicious behaviour are considered by the police as two of the most important anti-terrorism tools available. But probably more important is the role of the intelligence services, particularly MI5 and Scotland Yard’s Anti Terrorist Branch.

IRA members are unlikely to be caught in the act of making a bomb threat, but via careful surveillance and the use of informants, active service units can be tracked down.Dr Page believes the IRA might want to change tactics and target different forms of transport such as bridges or tunnels. He also speculated that it might want another “spectacular” hit similar to last year’s Docklands bomb, although this is more likely to result in death, which would seriously damage Sinn Fein’s hopes of entering talks with the new government.He said: “The IRA likes to change its tactics and to be unpredictable.”David Veness, the Metropolitan Police’s assistant commissioner with responsibility for specialist operations, emphasised that “the security assumption has got to be that there’s a threat to human life”. Evacuation was not automatic, he said, but employed only after sophis-ticated assessment of the threat.Dr Richard Clutterbuck, lecturer in security at Exeter University, said people were ready to take a greater degree of responsibility for their own safety, adding:”I would like to see the police tell us the dangers and let us decide on whether we want to take the risk or not…”Traffic disruption such as that caused by the IRA in England yesterday was once commonplace in the early 1990s in Belfast, but has not been seen on a large scale in recent years.. Parents of children denied places at popular local schools while other families cheat to gain offers are uniting in admissions blackspots to expose what they claim is the “myth of parental choice”. Amid evidence that in some authorities, hundreds of 10- and 11-year-olds have still not been allocated places for September, some parents are pledging to keep their children at home rather than accept offers from distant or low-performing schools.
The anger of new campaign groups being formed to fight for changes to admissions is directed at schools and local authorities but also at parents who use devious means to snatch places in over-subscribed schools.The Independent revealed last week how councils and individual schools were being forced to clamp down to catch out families giving bogus addresses within key catchment areas or falsely claiming religious beliefs to gain admission to church schools.Parents whose children have been squeezed out want new legislation to overturn the so-called Greenwich Judgement which obliged local authorities to accept children from outside their boundaries into their schools.Two of the most outspoken campaign groups were launched last month in Hertfordshire, where around 180 children have no offer of a place for next year.

Campaigners claim children from as far away as north London and neighbouring counties have been allocated places while their own children face journeys to school of up to 10 miles.The situation has arisen partly because Hertfordshire schools give priority to parents in any area who can make a case for a school’s suitability for their child before considering applications based on proximity.Michael Waller, of the Watford and South Herts Parents Group, said: “I and my fellow parents have no problem with schools attracting pupils from outside of the area to improve the standard of education available to all but that should not happen at the expense of local families.”A Hertfordshire County Council spokesman said the authority had done all it could to accommodate parents’ wishes and had squeezed 30 extra places into its schools.A pressure group founded last week in Wandsworth, south London, includes families who live less than 500 yards from their local secondary school yet have no right to a place.All but three schools in the Conservative-run borough are grant maintained and every school is either selective or specialist, with three secondaries selecting half of their pupils purely on ability regardless of where they live.Karen Loughran, founder of the Local Education Campaign said: “Parental choice is a myth in Wandsworth. It is only the academic elite or children of parents who can afford coaching for school entrance tests.”A Wandsworth spokesman said the authority had deliberately encouraged a range of schools in place of neighbourhood comprehensives. Those children without offers would have places by September as parents holding more than one place made their final choice.. Sharon Allen waits at home with her daughter Danielle knowing that she could have cheated to win a place at their chosen secondary school. Sharon and her husband Des, both property developers, own two houses just yards from St Albans’ Girls Grammar School, but missed out because they used their true home address – three miles away – to apply to Hertfordshire County Council. With just four months to a new school year, Danielle, 11, is among 44 children in the St Albans area still with no offer of a secondary school place.

Now the Allens, and fellow members of a local pressure group, Parents Charter 1997, are threatening to educate their children at home unless a suitable choice is forthcoming.
Photograph: Edward Sykes. On first day of full appeal, QC tells how crime squad put pressure on suspect with a

falsified statement
Police officers at the centre of the Carl Bridgewater murder investigation combined a carefully contrived device of deceit with oppression to extract the confession that led to the jailing of the four accused, the Court of Appeal was told yesterday.Michael Mansfield QC, counsel for the late Patrick Molloy, said the attitude of the officers was such that when confronted with evidence of a falsified statement one, Detective Sergeant John Robbins, volunteered to “personally pull the handle on these men and open the trap-door and hang them, and he would do it with a bacon sandwich in his hand.”The accusations came at the start of the full appeal on behalf of the Bridgewater Four against their 1979 convictions for the murder of the 13-year-old newspaper boy at Yew Tree Farm, near Stourbridge, West Midlands.James Robinson, 63, and cousins Michael Hickey, 35, and Vincent Hickey, 42, who were released on unconditional bail in February, were present in the packed courtroom at the Royal Courts of Justice in London. Mr Molloy died in 1981 while serving a 12-year sentence for manslaughter.In an extraordinary twist in the 19-year campaign to get the convictions overturned, the Court of Appeal freed the Hickeys and Mr Robinson after an independent forensic test, completed a fortnight earlier, revealed that the police had falsified a signed statement from Vincent Hickey purporting to implicate the others and shown it to Mr Molloy to provoke him into making a false confession.Mr Mansfield told the three judges, Lord Justice Roch and Mr Justices Hidden and Mitchell, that it had been “carefully analysed” which officers must have been involved in that contrivance and in the oppression meted out to Mr Molloy, who was interviewed at least 30 times over 31 hours at Womborne police station, Staffordshire, in the run-up to his “confession.” During the interrogation he denied involvement 80 times.The QC said all the officers were members of the Regional Crime Squad Number Four and the members responsible for Mr Molloy were headed by Detective Inspector Geoffrey Turner. He deputed the since discredited Detective Constable John Perkins, who died in 1992, and Detective Constable Graham Leake to interview Mr Molloy.