Murder of Stephen Tibble

During a chase through West Kensington, the unarmed Tibble was fatally shot by Liam Quinn, an American member of the Provisional Irish Republican Army.

At one point during the course of the operation, Blackledge noticed a man behaving in a suspicious manner outside house number 39 on Fairholme Road; when he spotted the same individual thirty minutes later he decided to question him.

It is often erroneously believed that Quinn fled into the tunnel at Barons Court tube station, but in fact he had been pursued by Wilson on Tibble's motorbike and evaded capture by running through the ground floor of a tower block off Talgarth Road.

This included the inadvertent car-bomb killing of Gordon Hamilton-Fairley, a cancer specialist who was not the target, and the assassination of Ross McWhirter, a conservative political activist and a co-founder of the Guinness Book of Records; he was shot on his doorstep by the unit after he offered a reward for their capture.

[2] After serving a prison sentence in Ireland for IRA membership, Quinn, a US citizen of Irish and Mexican descent,[5] returned to San Francisco shortly after his release.

[6] Quinn served eleven years in Portaloise prison before he was released in April 1999, along with the rest of the Balcombe Street gang, under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement.