Wilkie was working in Treforest, Mid Glamorgan, as a taxi driver, driving a Ford Cortina for City Centre Cars, based in Bute Street, Cardiff.
[2] On 30 November 1984, Wilkie's fare was David Williams, who lived in Rhymney and worked at the Merthyr Vale mine, 6 miles (9.7 km) away.
Kim Howells, speaking for the South Wales National Union of Mineworkers, blamed the attack on the attempts to persuade miners to return to work.
"[6] As Kinnock went on to denounce the lack of the ballot, the violence against strikebreakers and the tactical approach of Scargill, he was asked by hecklers what he had done for the striking miners.
[11] The two men who caused Wilkie's death, Dean Hancock and Russell Shankland, were found guilty of murder by a majority verdict on 16 May 1985 (by which time the strike had ended) and sentenced to life imprisonment.
[12][13] A third man, Anthony Williams, who had been present on the bridge but was found to have actively discouraged them from dropping the concrete block, was acquitted.
Kim Howells, the South Wales NUM official who commented on the killing of David Wilkie, later became a Member of parliament for the Labour Party and served as a minister in the Blair government and later became chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee, a committee of parliamentarians that oversees the work of Britain's intelligence and security agencies.
In 2004 he said that when he heard that a taxi driver had been killed, he thought "hang on, we've got all those records we've kept over in the NUM offices, there's all those maps on the wall, we're gonna get implicated in this".