YVONNE FLETCHER DEATH IN SAINT JAMES

Part 1

 

Copyright Joe Vialls - 15/01/96 - All Rights Reserved

 

            On the morning of 17th April 1984 an unarmed policewoman by the name of Yvonne Fletcher was gunned down in cold blood while on duty outside the Libyan People's Bureau in St. James Square. British accusations that the Libyan Government was responsible were wrong. Yvonne Fletcher was murdered in a pre-meditated "black" Psyop (Psychological operation) designed to manipulate British emotions on television. Two years later when America launched a vicious bombing attack on Libya from British bases, only a handful of voices were raised in protest. After all, the Libyans murdered an unarmed English policewoman didn't they? No, they did not.

          More than ten years after the event, to even suggest that the Libyans did not murder Yvonne Fletcher evokes anger, because everyone knows the Libyans were proved guilty when Yvonne died on television outside their Bureau. Who proved that the Libyans murdered Yvonne Fletcher? The media, in a politically-correct feeding frenzy where truth and British national security fell casualty to the greater needs of the "international community". The media had no proof to back its hysterical propaganda after her murder, and appeared not to need any. Ironically perhaps, Yvonne Fletcher's deceptive assassination was staged in 1984, the same year chosen by George Orwell as the title for his famous book, in which the television media continually distorted or reversed the truth to suit the whims of a global elite.

          All covert operations involve deception to a greater or lesser degree and St James was no exception. The police present that day were briefed that a group of anti-Quadhafi demonstrators would be cordoned on the inner pavement of the Square, enabling them to demonstrate peacefully against Libyan staff situated in their bureau across the road at number five. As with all such briefings the police were told to keep both factions apart, with the dividing line being the road itself. Since there were only two groups opposing each other, it was "obvious" that if a member of one of the two groups was injured, the other group would be responsible. So when Yvonne Fletcher was shot in the vicinity of the anti-Quadhafi demonstrators, the immediate assumption was that she must have been shot from the Libyan Bureau. It seemed there was no other option, but there was.

Two professional television cameras were filming at the time, one located outside the Bureau at 5 St James and the other outside 8 St James. In ballistics terms the footage from those two cameras provides most of the hard scientific proof needed to prove the shots could not have been fired by the Libyans, and confirms the firing platform was located in a building on the northern side of the square, well to the west of the Libyan Bureau. Forensic details from Yvonne Fletcher's post mortem provide the balance of irrefutable scientific evidence.

          Early that day crowd barriers were placed round the central garden pavements of St James Square, and also to the west of the Libyan Bureau in front of numbers 7 and 8. The anti-Quadhafi demonstrators were ushered behind the barriers in the inner square at 10.15 am and a senior police officer then personally positioned twenty police constables, including WPC Fletcher, in an arc facing the inner square. Significantly, although there were more than 50 police personnel present in the Square, Yvonne Fletcher, the shortest constable in the Metropolitan Police Force, was the only female officer present.

          As the constable with the lightest body weight facing multiple demonstrators of considerable bulk, every rule in the book says the senior officer should have positioned Yvonne well out on one of the flanks, but he did not do so. Yvonne Fletcher was deliberately positioned on the apex of the curve in front of the Libyan Bureau, in front of the television cameras, and directly in the chosen line of fire from 8 St James Square.

          Just four minutes later at 10.19 am a 3-shot burst of automatic fire rang out. Yvonne Fletcher was hit by the first bullet in the upper right back. Bullet entry angle was 60 degrees from the horizontal, with an exit wound visible below the left rib cage. If the entry and exit wounds are lined up with her known height, and her televised position when the shots were fired, the line of fire backtracks precisely to the top floor of 8 St James Square. No other building in St James Square is high enough or at the correct azimuth to facilitate the sixty degree shot. At the coronial inquest into her death, creative media deception "proved" that Yvonne Fletcher was killed by a shot fired from the first floor of the Libyan Bureau on her left-hand side, at only 15 degrees from the horizontal!

        The continuous television video sound track records the crowd chanting, followed by a bullet strike on a human body, followed in turn by the sounds of three equally-spaced very fast shots. By far the most important point proved by the sound is that the camera microphone located outside the Libyan Bureau recorded the `whump' of the bullet striking Yvonne Fletcher before it recorded the sound of the three shots being fired. What this means in layman terms is that the bullet which killed her was supersonic, and was fired from a position more distant from the camera's microphone than Yvonne Fletcher herself. This analysis alone proves the shots could not have been fired from the Libyan Bureau under any circumstances.

          If the shots were fired from the Libyan Bureau they would have crossed over the camera microphone before the first bullet hit Yvonne Fletcher, i.e. the microphone would have recorded a different sound sequence: first a single shot, then the bullet impact, then shots two and three - whether the bullets were supersonic or not. There is absolutely no trace of this latter sequence on the audio, which also destroys the claim made at the coronial inquest that two 9-mm Sterling sub-machine guns fired at the same time from the Libyan Bureau. The professional television audio proves in absolute scientific terms that no shots were fired from the Bureau, nor from any other building on the eastern side of St James Square that day.

          The camera positioned outside the Bureau panned left and right, showing demonstrators massed along the pavement on the inner square. When the shots were fired, this camera zoomed in and filmed the demonstrators falling sideways to the ground towards the camera's left. So their physical response was to shrapnel and noise from the opposite direction: exactly the line of fire from 8 St James. The massive kinetic energy and inertia of the high velocity assault round fired at her from 8 St James Square, knocked Yvonne Fletcher to the ground in precisely the same direction as the demonstrators, once again proving the direct line of fire. The second TV camera at 8 St James then zoomed in to show Yvonne Fletcher rolling from side to side on the road, dying on national television in excruciating agony for the greater good of the "international community".

          It is no great secret that many embassies stock weapons for use in self defence, which are normally limited to handguns loaded with jacketed or solid lead bullets of standard military type, normally 9-mm parabellum, designed to remain intact and not expand on entry to the body. In the case of the 9 millimetre 115 grain bullet fired by defensive pistols, and sub-machine guns such as the Sterling, energy falls from 341 foot-pounds at the muzzle, to 241 foot-pounds at 100 yards. Quite enough to cause serious injury, but rarely death if hit in the upper right back at fifty yards. Conversely, the energy from high velocity 7.62-mm burst-fire assault rifles such as the Belgian FN or German Heckler and Koch51, firing a 150 grain standard military round is a massive 2,288 foot-pounds at 100 yards. Enough to go straight through a policewoman with energy to spare.

          The full Fletcher autopsy report will never be made public, but details released at the coronial inquest into her death are sufficient for military experts to prove that a 9-mm parabellum bullet fired by a Sterling could not have been responsible for the terrible damage inflicted, even at point-blank range. After entering WPC Fletcher's upper right back the single bullet damaged the right lung, completely destroyed both lobes of the liver, shredded the large inferior vena cava vein leading to the left ventricle of the heart, caused damage to the spine and cut the pancreas in half, before completing its 12 inch track through her body and exiting below the left rib cage, continuing on to cause further injuries to Fletcher's left elbow. Massive injuries like these sustained through 12 inches of human tissue, can only be caused by the colossal hydrostatic impact and inertia of a full bore (7.62-mm) high velocity assault round.

          To rule out any further argument on this point, tissue tests were conducted in Australia to establish the maximum penetration of 9-mm parabellum rounds in pig carcasses. At its maximum muzzle velocity of 1,350 feet per second, the 115 grain bullet fired at 50 yards penetrated only 6 inches, with no hydrostatic effect at all on wet organs such as the liver. Then, to counter ridiculous claims from London that Yvonne might have been killed by a "silenced" pistol or sub-machine gun, more 115 grain rounds were downloaded to a subsonic (silenced) velocity of 900 feet per second. At 50 yards these puny rounds penetrated only 1.5 inches. Further tests established in absolute scientific terms that the minimum round needed to inflict Fletcher's hydrostatic injuries and penetrate 12 inches of tissue, was a bullet with a minimum weight of 150 grains, fired at a velocity in excess of 2,750 feet per second. Such rounds can only be chambered and burst-fired by full-bore high velocity assault weapons.

          There are three high velocity rifle rounds specifically designed to cause the savage fatal injuries suffered by Yvonne Fletcher that day, the worst of which is the `petal' fragible, an assassination bullet designed to enter the body before its nose separates into several razor-sharp high velocity splinters, leaving the heavy base of the bullet to continue on a straight track through the body. If three petal frags were fired, with only one striking Fletcher, the remaining two would explode on impact with the paving, hurling razor-sharp metal shrapnel fragments and hard granite chippings in a low arc towards the anti-Quadhafi demonstrators standing behind the barriers just beyond Yvonne Fletcher's position. Quite enough to injure a large number of bystanders but not kill them, which is exactly what happened at 10.19 am on the morning of 17 April 1984.

The question has to asked whether the objective of the covert operation was simply to splatter a few demonstrators with shards of shrapnel, which would have been enough to swing public opinion against Libya. Perhaps the operation simply went wrong and Yvonne Fletcher was killed by mistake? No. The sound track analysis and film footage prove she was hit by the first shot in the 3-shot burst. The first shot in an automatic burst always hits its target, before the weapon "walks" due to recoil effect. Therefore the assault rifle sights were lined-up on Yvonne Fletcher's back when the shooter squeezed the trigger. The only possible verdict is pre-meditated murder.

       Hours after Yvonne's death, when the counter-terrorist squadron of the Special Air Service arrived by helicopter from Hereford, its members were advised by a senior police officer that the shots were fired from the Libyan Bureau at 5 St James Square. Good though the SAS normally is at countering terrorists in multiple environments, this wildly inaccurate police information made it impossible for the Squadron to successfully track down Yvonne Fletcher's ruthless killers.

          There are few things more sacred to the British public than the safety of its proudly unarmed police force. Therefore the murder of a young unarmed policewoman on the streets of London would generate feelings of intense loathing in the British public and direct raw hatred towards the Libyans as the supposed killers. It did, but the public remained unaware of the real culprits as the horrifying sight of Yvonne Fletcher dying on national television was beamed across Britain into millions of homes.

          Police Special Branch and MI5 had suspicions of course. The shots rang out for no obvious reason, and seasoned officers understood only too well that for the Libyans to kill an unarmed policewoman in broad daylight on a London street was tantamount to committing diplomatic suicide. Making the task even harder for police was their exclusion from the first three days of COBRA intelligence meetings after the murder, chaired by the Deputy Prime Minister, while Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was out of the country on an official visit to Portugal.

          It was an entirely critical time when the police were in hot pursuit of the murderer of an unarmed British policewoman, and had every right to storm the Libyan People's Bureau in order to search for evidence. Indeed the police wanted to storm the building, but permission was refused by the chairman of COBRA. It is perhaps a coincidence that, at this early stage, storming the Libyan Bureau could only have proved that no shots were fired from there at all.

          The Chairman of COBRA and members of MI6 at the Foreign Office were demonstrably certain that Yvonne Fletcher was not killed by Libyans located in the Bureau, because after a creative media feeding frenzy and a bloodless siege that lasted until 22 April 1984, Britain broke off diplomatic relations with Libya and ordered the occupants of the Bureau to leave the country within seven days. They departed on 27 April, with no suspects being arrested or charged with her murder. Immediately after their departure the Libyan Bureau was entered and searched from top to bottom by a specialist military clearance team looking for booby traps, weapons and ammunition. Despite an exhaustive search of every nook and cranny in the building, nothing was found, a fact reported by the media the next day