[8] The incident triggered a rampage by members of the Parachute Regiment in the nearby, overwhelmingly Irish nationalist town of Coalisland, some ten miles to the east.

[11] The deployment of the paratroopers, which began in April[2][12] had already been criticised by republican activist and former Member of Parliament Bernadette Devlin McAliskey, who denounced beatings, shootings and damages to property reportedly carried out by the troops.

[13] These previous incidents included the destruction of fishing gear and boats in the townland of Kinturk, near Ardboe,[13] and a brawl on 22 April between soldiers and motorists at a checkpoint in Stewartstown, in which plastic bullets were fired that ended with a civilian and two paratroopers wounded.

According to a Social Democratic and Labour Party politician,[7] the soldiers fabricated a bogus bomb warning, while the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) stated that the operation began when a joint police/military patrol was stoned by a crowd.

[22] One of the wounded was the brother of IRA volunteer Kevin O'Donnell, who had been killed by the Special Air Service (SAS) in February during an ambush at the nearby hamlet of Clonoe, shortly after carrying out a machine-gun attack on the local RUC base.

[21] About 500 people attended a protest rally in Coalisland on 19 May, and the wisdom of deploying the troops to patrol the town was questioned by members of the Dáil in Dublin.

[13][21] Bernardette McAliskey went even further, suggesting that the recovery of the machine gun near Cappagh, where the initial IRA attack had taken place, was actually staged by the security forces as a publicity stunt.

[32][33] The same day there were further clashes with local residents, this time in the town of Cookstown,[34] when a group of people that the Belfast News-Letter called "drunken hooligans" assaulted a number of paratroopers trying to help an elderly man who was suffering a heart attack.

The programme also interviewed Alistair Hodgson, the soldier maimed at Cappagh, who said that "had another member of my unit been injured in the way that I was, I would have been with the rest of the lads attacking the locals".

[39] Authors Andrew Sanders and Ian S. Wood[22] suggested that the deployment of the battalion in Coalisland and elsewhere hindered the British policy of police primacy in Northern Ireland.

[22] Fresh clashes between local residents and troops were reported at Coalisland on 6 March 1994, a few months before the first IRA ceasefire,[40] when a crowd assaulted two soldiers after the RUC searched a car.