1996 Manchester Bombing - Investigation

Investigation

In an effort to trace the route of the Ford Cargo truck, police examined CCTV footage from every major road and motorway taken in England within two days of the bombing. Footage revealed that the truck 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 a Ford Granada. Detectives surmised that the truck 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 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 truck's last registered owner told police that he had sold it to a dealer in Peterborough, who had in turn sold the truck 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 truck 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 discovered 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 positioned 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, 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 had ceased to be 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.