A TOP cop snared the Brighton bomber with a tiny hidden clue on a hotel keycard – and it foiled 16 more plots.
The bombing on October 12, 1984, tore apart the Brighton Grand Hotel.
The then-prime minister Margaret Thatcher and members of her cabinet were staying at the hotel while the Conservative Party conference took place.
Five people were killed in the explosion and another 34 were injured.
Patrick Magee, who planted the device, was handed eight life sentences at the Old Bailey in 1986 with a recommendation he serve a minimum of 35 years.
He was released in 1999 under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement.
Now the former head of forensics at Scotland Yard David Tadd has revealed how his team solved the case and found Magee.
The Metropolitan Police determined the bomber had put the explosive behind a bath panel in room 629.
“We sifted all the rubble, looking for component parts of a device, little bits of wire, bits of batter,” Tadd told The Sunday Times.
“We dealt with loads of bomb scenes, so we knew how to do it.”
Tadd, along with his team of 12 forensics specialists, studied the hotel cards of hundreds of guests who’d stayed in the room.
The registration cards were narrowed down to a fake name – Roy Walsh.
Walsh had checked in for three days on September 15, 27 days before the bomb detonated.
Tadd, now 77, found a scrap of fingerprint evidence on the card and cross-referenced it with around 200 IRA suspects.
On January 17, 1985, he found out the prints matched IRA member Patrick Magee.
Magee was arrested along with four others in a Glasgow flat in June.
The force discovered further plans to detonate 15 bombs at seaside resorts around Britain.
Another bomb had been planted at the Rubens hotel in London, outside Buckingham Palace, and was set to detonate on July 29.
Tadd concluded: “Can you imagine the mayhem it would have caused?
“They had a go at the prime minister and now they were having a go at the Queen.”
It comes after the daughter of an MP murdered in the Brighton bombing said it would make her life easier if the man responsible would state that the IRA’s violence was wrong.
Jo Berry, whose father was Sir Anthony Berry, the former Conservative MP for Enfield Southgate, said she had struck up a “very unusual friendship” with Magee.
Ms Berry, who was 27 at the time, says she cannot believe that 40 years have passed.
She said: “I can still remember the day very well, I can remember the trauma, the horror, the shock, the waiting.
“We had to wait until mid-afternoon to get news that they had found my dad’s body.
“It was so public and it still is. There is something about terror attacks, they never go away.”
She said her father was “one of those MPs who really cared”.
“He was well respected on both sides of the chamber,” she said.
“He was loved by the people in his constituency, he loved nothing more than meeting people and helping them.
“He was very much a family man, very private man who loved nothing more than having his six children be with him.
“He was a wonderful dad.”
