Five boxes of police documents relating to the Guildford pub bombings were destroyed in error.
The files were mistakenly destroyed by a Surrey Police contractor in 2016, a pre-inquest told. Surrey coroner, Richard Travers, is considering an application to resume an inquest into the deaths of five people killed in the IRA pub attacks in 1974.
Soldiers Ann Hamilton, 19, Caroline Slater, 18, William Forsyth, 18, and John Hunter, 17, plus plasterer Paul Craig, 21 died following the first blast at the Horse and Groom on 5 October.
The Guildford Four – Paul Hill, Gerry Conlon, Patrick Armstrong and Carole Richardson were jailed for life in 1975 but in 1989 they were released and cleared from all charges after 14 years in prison; they were wrongly-convicted and had become known as one of Britain’s biggest miscarriages of justice.
Jeremy Johnson, representing Surrey Police, explained how that investigations into who carried out the bombings should be led by police, not a coroner.
He said: “It’s not the function of an inquest to answer the very broad questions that might arise from the IRA’s bombing campaign in the 1970s and the police investigation that resulted. That question is for a minister in determining whether to initiate a public inquiry.”
He said the police force had gathered 2,674 witness statements, 60 interview transcripts and 1,161 other documents on the bombings.
He added: “It’s known that five boxes of material have been destroyed, but they contain documents which, at least to a large extent and possibly to a complete extent, are copied elsewhere,”
“That obviously should not have happened and that matter was referred to the information commissioner at the time.”
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