Blair apologizes for wrong jailings

LONDON — Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain offered an unusual public apology Wednesday to members of two families wrongly jailed for bombings by the Irish Republican Army in the 1970s.

The cases of the so-called Guildford Four and the Maguire Seven were among the most notorious examples of jail terms later quashed on appeal. Some of the accused served 15 years in prison and their incarceration was depicted as one of Britain's most serious miscarriages of justice.

The story of two of the detainees, Gerry Conlon and his father, Guiseppe, who died in custody in 1980, was made into the Oscar-nominated 1993 movie "In the Name of the Father."

Gerry Conlon was one of four people, along with Paddy Armstrong, Paul Hill and Carole Richardson, jailed for an IRA bomb attack in 1974 on a pub at Guildford near London frequented by British troops. The attack killed four soldiers and a civilian.

Guiseppe Conlon and members of Annie Maguire's family were also arrested on charges related to bombings in southeast London. The appeals court quashed the convictions of the Guildford Four in 1989 after legal challenges to the validity of police evidence. The remaining sentences were overturned in 1991.

In a videotaped message broadcast on national television, Blair said that "there was a miscarriage of justice" in the imprisonment of all 11 accused.

"I recognize the trauma that the conviction caused the Conlon and Maguire families and the stigma which wrongly attaches to them to this day," Blair said.

"I am very sorry that they were subject to such an ordeal and such an injustice," Blair continued. "That's why I am making this apology Wednesday. They deserve to be completely and publicly exonerated."

Conlon met privately with Blair and said the prime minister "went further than we actually expected" in his expression of personal regret. "The sincerity shone through," Conlon, 50, said, praising what he called Blair's "moral courage."

"We felt that as a family we have been restored our self-respect," he said.

The reasons for the timing of Blair's move remain unclear. Efforts to revive Northern Ireland's power-sharing government, a crucial element in the province's peace effort, are stalled and the IRA has withdrawn a conditional offer to put its weapons beyond use.

The IRA withdrew the offer after it was widely accused of staging a $50 million bank heist in Belfast. There had also been speculation that Blair would offer his apology in Parliament.

The leader of Northern Ireland's relatively moderate Social Democratic and Labor Party, Mark Durkan, said there had been "no choreography, no trade-off" involved in the timing of the apology. And an aide to Blair, speaking for the prime minister on condition of anonymity, said the British leader had not been trying to send a political signal.