Bailey: garda warned I’d get a bullet in the head

THE garda driving Ian Bailey after his arrest for the murder of Sophie Toscan du Plantier ten years ago told him, “even if we don’t pin this on you, you are finished in Ireland, you will be found dead with a bullet in the back of the head,” it was claimed yesterday.

Describing his arrest on February 10, 1997, he said: “I was shackled, handcuffs put on. I was put into a car. I was told I was arrested for the murder.”

Asked to describe his reaction, he said “absolute astonishment, disbelief”.

“I was put into the back of a car. The car was driven out to Bandon. The atmosphere was extremely aggressive and hostile. Officer Culligan was in the back with me, he was verbally aggressive, telling me I should get my act together, they knew I was the killer.

“I was in a state of numbed shock. I was protesting, knowing I was innocent. I said I had nothing to do with it,” he said.

Mr Bailey said the driver, whom he did not name, turned around and made the comment about him ending up dead from a gunshot wound.

He said there was a large group of journalists and photographers gathered outside Bandon Garda Station. He said he tried to use a headrest to protect his face from photographers.

“The driver who made the death threat said: ‘You are being violent’. I saw photographer, Mike Brown and he accessed the barrack and photographed me being taken in the back doors.”

That photograph appeared in The Sun and other papers the next day. “From that moment on, and until now, I was put in the frame for this, a crime I had nothing to do with,” he said.

He claimed that an unknown garda member told him as he was being released that there was a lynching mob waiting for him in Schull. He went to Skibbereen where he stayed with a friend.

He said his home was under siege from journalists when he returned after a few days. He said the only reason he agreed to speak to journalists was in the hope that they would return to their newsdesks if they got some quotes from him.

Mr Bailey also hoped to re-butt their allegations. He said they asked him highly detailed, personalised questions, and that the only people he had told of those things were Garda JP Culligan and Garda Denis Harrington.

Mr Bailey made these allegations on the second day of his case at the High Court appealing the libel action against the Daily Telegraph, the London Times (and Sunday Times), the Irish Sunday Independent, the Independent on Sunday and the Star, which he lost at Cork Circuit Court three years ago.