Judith Ward
On 4 February 1974, a 25-pound (11 kg) bomb planted by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) in a coach on the M62 motorway in northern England exploded, killing twelve people (nine soldiers and three civilians) and injuring thirty-eight others aboard the vehicle. The IRA hid the bomb inside a luggage locker of the coach, which was carrying off-duty British Armed Forces personnel and their family members.
Ten days after the bombing, 25-year-old Judith Ward was arrested in Liverpool while waiting to board a ferry to Ireland. She was later convicted of the M62 coach bombing and two other separate, non-fatal attacks and remained incarcerated until her conviction was quashed by the Court of Appeal in 1992, with the court hearing Government forensic scientists had deliberately withheld information from her defence counsel at her October 1974 trial which strongly indicated her innocence. As such, her conviction was declared unsafe.
Ward was released from prison in May 1992, having served over 17 years of a sentence of life imprisonment plus thirty years. Her wrongful conviction is seen as one of the worst miscarriages of justice in British legal history.
The M62 coach bomb has been described as "one of the IRA's worst mainland terror attacks" and remains one of the deadliest mainland acts of the Troubles.
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