Airstrip One

Irish Republican Assassination?

A former British Army sniper, who may have claimed the lives of six terrorists, was gunned down in a London street last month.

Scotland Yard is investigating the London shooting death of a former British army sniper who was prominent in the Northern Ireland campaign.Retired Warrant Officer Michael Norman, 62, formerly of the Coldstream Guards, was found with a bullet wound to the stomach in a green BMW April 17 with a 9 mm handgun nearby.Norman, who left the army in 1989 after 22 years, built a reputation in Northern Ireland and other operational theaters as a high-grade sniper. He is reputed to have killed as many as six Irish Republican Army gunmen during anti-terrorist operations, The Times of London reported Tuesday.He was also an anonymous witness at the inquiry into the Bloody Sunday deaths in Londonderry in 1972, according to his former wife, Fiona McNab.

Further reporting in the Telegraph on the 30th April stated that the police authorities had not ruled out suicide as a cause of death. However, a more recent article in the Hounslow Guardian revealed that the police were appealing for witnesses in a death that they were now treating as murder.