What if we had to say goodbye to Queen Elizabeth already forty years ago? Until now it had never been revealed, but in 1983 during a visit of the English sovereign to the United States, the FBI managed to thwart an attempt to assassinate her.
The shocking revelation emerges from a series of new documents declassified by the Federal Bureau of Investigation relating to the queen’s travels to the United States. Well, a file kept well hidden so far documents that there was a concrete threat to a police officer in San Francisco: he, who frequented an Irish pub, in fact warned federal agents of what a man he had met in the club had told him , or that he wanted to take revenge for the death of his daughter who “had been killed in Northern Ireland by a rubber bullet”.
The conversation dates back to February 4, 1983, about a month before Queen Elizabeth II and her husband Prince Philip visited California. “He wanted to harm Queen Elizabeth and he would have done so by dropping something from the Golden Gate Bridge on the royal yacht Britannia, as she passed in the waters below. Alternatively he would have attempted to kill her queen during her visit to Yosemite National Park.’
The secret services then decided to “close the walkways on the bridge at the moment of passage of the yacht” it is not clear what measures were taken in Yosemite, but the visit went as planned.
The other attack (with gunfire)
But this in 1983 was not the only time Queen Elizabeth was the target of a failed assassination attempt. On June 13, 1981, a man, hidden in the crowd, shoots at the British sovereign who leads the Trooping the Color procession. Elizabeth II is in uniform and flaunts legendary self-control. She calms the horse and goes on, while the guards arrest the bomber. Marcus Sarjeant, the bomber, fires six shots. The weapon is a starter, the kind used in athletics competitions. The man will tell that he wanted to become famous as Marc Chapman, the assassination of John Lennon. Burmese rears up, Queen Elizabeth reassures her. The BBC, which as always followed the parade live, limited itself to saying: “It seems that someone fired shots at the Queen”. When she returns to Buckingham Palace, the British sovereign merely underlines that the mare was not frightened by the shots, but by the confusion of the Household Cavarly who, thinking of an attack, huddled around her. Sarjeant serves two years in prison.
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