20 August 1988
At around 12:30 AM on 20 August 1988, a 52-seat bus was carrying 36 soldiers of the Light Infantry from RAF Aldergrove to a military base near Omagh. The men had just finished a short leave - they were part-way through an 18-month tour of duty and were returning to base. As the bus drove along the main road west of Ballygawley, in the townland of Curr, the Provisional IRA's Tyrone Brigade detonated a roadside bomb containing approximately 200 pounds of Semtex by command wire from about 300 metres away. The blast hurled the bus 30 metres down the road and scattered soldiers into the surrounding hedges and fields. A crater six feet deep was left in the road. Eight soldiers died: Jayson Burfitt (19), Richard Greener (21), Mark Norsworthy (18), Stephen Wilkinson (18), Jason Winter (19), Blair Bishop (19), Alexander Lewis (18) and Peter Bullock (21). Twenty-eight were wounded. It was the single biggest loss of life for the British Army from an IRA attack in Northern Ireland since the Warrenpoint ambush in 1979. After the attack the British military began moving troops in and out of east Tyrone by helicopter. The bombing also contributed to the British government's decision, two months later, to introduce the broadcasting ban on Sinn Féin and IRA voices. State papers declassified in 2019 described the attack as sparking 'panic' in the British government. An inquest heard that the road the bus used was normally off-limits to military vehicles; the driver stated he had been directed onto it by diversion signs whose origin was never established.