On this day in true crime a republican was hanged for planting a bomb outside a London prison..
free picture hosting.
Prison: Visiting time - Clerkenwell
The man reputedly responsible for the Clerkenwell bombing – the worst terrorist incident in Britain in the nineteenth century - was hanged on May 26th, 1868.

27-year-old Michael Barrett was born in Co Fermanagh and blamed for the planting of a bomb in a wheelbarrow outside a prison wall in Clerkenwell, London in December 1867.

A dozen people were killed and many more severely injured in an attempt to free Richard O’Sullivan-Burke, a senior Republican arms agent imprisoned in the jail.

A dozen people were killed and many more severely injured when the bomb, left in a wheelbarrow, exploded outside the prison wall.

At his trial in the Old Bailey, a Dubliner Patrick Mullaney claimed Barrett had informed him he triggered the bomb.

Despite a lack of corroborative evidence, and a free passage to Australia for the chief witness, Barrett was found guilty of murder.

He was hanged on Tuesday, May 26th, 1868, outside Newgate Prison before a “vast concourse of a crowd.”

The hanging made history, being Britain’s last public execution.

Queen Victoria was outraged that only one man went to the gallows. She urged that in future, instead of being brought to trial, Irish Republican suspects should be lynched on the spot.

However, a socialist Sunday newspaper stated: “Millions will continue to doubt that a guilty man has been hanged, and the future historian of the Fenian panic may declare that Michael Barrett was sacrificed to the exigencies of the police, and the vindication of the good Tory principle, that there is nothing like blood.”