Republican News · Thursday 9 January 2003

Thug dismissed but Scots Guards welcome murderers

A Scots Guard who assaulted a colleague in a Limavady pub with a broken glass two years ago, leaving his victim requiring 26 stitches, is to be dismissed from the British Army after he was found guilty of the assault in Derry Court on Wednesday.

Alexander Joseph Brown, 24, stationed at Shackleton Barracks in Ballykelly, was sentenced to three years for the savage assault. The Army immediately made it clear that he would be dismissed. Brown is a member of the same regiment, the Scots Guards, as Jamie Fisher and Mark Wright, the Scots Guards convicted of the 1992 murder of Belfast teenager Peter McBride. His killer colleagues, however, were given early release in September 1998 by the then British Secretary of State, Mo Mowlam. They had served just four years of their life sentences and were allowed back into the British Army two months later.

Gerry Adams, whose meeting with Tony Blair was put back because of bad weather on Wednesday, had planned to raise with the British Prime Minister the McBride family's bid to terminate the careers of the two Scots Guards.