Persistent threats that span decades. The FBI has revealed archival documents relating to potential threats and even a plan to assassinate Elizabeth II during her travels in the United States. Among these documents, a note concerns in particular the trip made by the Queen and Prince Philip to the West Coast of the United States in 1983.
According to information obtained by the San Francisco police via a source close to Irish nationalist circles, a man, who claimed that “his daughter had been killed in Northern Ireland by a rubber bullet”, issued the plan to “harm Queen Elizabeth”.
He would do so “either by dropping an object from the Golden Gate Bridge onto the Royal Yacht Britannia as it passed under it, or by attempting to kill the Queen during her visit to Yosemite National Park.”
Four years earlier, in 1979, the paramilitary group Irish Republican Army had killed in a bomb attack Lord Louis Mountbatten, the cousin of Elizabeth II, in the midst of Troubles which saw Republicans and Northern Irish Unionists clash. .
Another note, relating to a state visit by the Queen in 1991, discusses threats from Irish groups to disrupt events the monarch was scheduled to attend, such as a baseball game and reception at the White House.
The queen, who died last September at the age of 96, was the subject of several assassination attempts.
In 1970, suspected IRA sympathizers tried to derail his train west of Sydney, Australia, and in 1981 the IRA planned a bombing during a visit to the north of Scotland.
