A FORMER British paratrooper, who deserted to join the Provisional IRA and bomb British army barracks, was yesterday sentenced to 14 years in prison for attacks in the early 1970s, but was later freed.
Because of time already served in the United States fighting extradition and his subsequent public renunciation of the IRA, Peter McMullen was set free.
Nicknamed "Pete the Para" he was responsible for injuring a woman worker when the four bombs he had planted exploded at the Royal Engineers Claro barracks near Ripon, North Yorkshire, in March 1972.
At York Crown Court yesterday, Judge Arthur Myerson told him: "This was a bad case. It was carefully planned by you and it was daringly executed."
But the judge accepted that McMullen - allegedly under a death threat for refusing to obey IRA orders - had long since repudiated all violence.
McMullen, at one stage a corporal with the 1st Battalion Parachute Regiment, had previously pleaded guilty to three charges of causing explosions and another of intending to cause an explosion.
McMullen, the prosecution said, had deserted from Palace Barracks in Belfast in January 1972, taking two firearms. He was recruited by the Provisional IRA and sent to Britain to set up IRA cells and pick targets for bombing.
After the Claro bombing he was arrested for a firearms offence in the Republic, convicted by the Central Criminal Court in Dublin and imprisoned until 1977.
After being released, he refused to carry out an IRA kidnapping and fled to the US. There he spent some time in jail fighting deportation but was freed after a court ruled that his crimes were political and he should not be extradited. Changes to legislation allowed him to be rearrested in 1986 and he subsequently spent more than nine years in custody fighting the request.
McMullen's counsel, Mr Edward Fitzgerald QC, said if it had not been for the former soldier's confession the charges would not have been brought against him at all.
. The Sinn Fein spokesman on prison issues, Mr Joe Austin, said that the release criterion applied by the judge in McMullen's case, which took into account the time he served in prison in the United States, should apply to all republican prisoners.