Dissident republican who was jailed for 10 years for trying to bring huge bomb into UK found with head injuries in Athy
A Real IRA member who tried to bomb Britain with an explosive device larger than the one that caused the 1998 Omagh massacre has been murdered in the Irish Republic.
Larry Keane, who was known as "Bomber", was found fatally injured in a walkway in Athy, Co Kildare on Thursday night, the Garda Síochána said. He died in hospital on Friday morning.
The 56-year-old was sentenced to 10 years in prison in the same year as the Omagh atrocity, which killed 29 people, after he was caught with a bomb weighing almost 1,000lbs on a ferry from Ireland to Britain.
At the time the Real IRA was conducting a bombing campaign in Northern Ireland and Britain aimed at destabilising unionism and preventing a political settlement in Belfast.
Gardai found Keane, who was unconscious with a head injury, late on Thursday night in a walkway between St John's Lane and the Greenhills housing estate in Athy, Co Kildare.
He was taken to Naas general hospital, where he died at 5am on Friday morning.
The scene was sealed off pending a forensic examination and an incident room set up at Athy garda station. The Republic's state pathologist was informed and a postmortem was expected to get under way on Friday.
In December 1998, Keane, a father of six from Cloney, Athy, pleaded guilty in Dublin's special criminal court to having 980lbs of an improvised explosive mixture, a time power unit, an electrical detonator, two improvised booster tubes and an improvising detonating cord with intent to endanger life or enable another person to do so. Keane was stopped by gardai at Dún Laoghaire port on 2 April 1998.
The court of criminal appeal determined that Keane's role was a lesser one than that of those who planned and made the bomb, reducing his prison term to 10 years.
Keane's attempt to smuggle the explosives on to the ferry and into England came just before the signing of the Good Friday agreement and four months before the Real IRA's bomb in Omagh became the single biggest atrocity in the Northern Ireland Troubles.
His death came in the same week that another Real IRA bomber, Seamus McKenna, was buried in his native Co Louth near the border. McKenna had been named in a civil action taken by families of the Omagh victims who accused him of transporting the Real IRA bomb to the Co Tyrone market town in August 1998. He died from injuries after falling from the roof of a school in Dundalk last week but was kept alive on a life support machine until his organs could be donated.