Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams Thursday denounced the British government for charging an Irish Republican Army (IRA) activist with murdering four soldiers in a 1982 bombing.
 

Adams said the murder charges filed Wednesday against John Downey in connection with a July20, 1982, London bombing — which killed four British soldiers — constituted a breach of London’s peace commitments to the IRA. Adams’s Sinn Fein organization is the IRA’s political arm.

Prosecutors say Downey, 61, was responsible for the improvised explosive device placed in a car which blew up in London’s Hyde Park on July 20, 1982, killing four members of the Royal Household Cavalry as they paraded towards Buckingham Palace, Queen Elizabeth’s residence, the London Telegraph reported.

Another 23 soldiers suffered shrapnel wounds in the bombing, one of the most high-profile attacks carried out by the IRA in its decades-long fight to drive British forces out of Northern Ireland.

Downey was remanded in custody until a bail hearing scheduled Friday.

Sinn Fein said Thursday that Downey’s arrest provides “yet more alarming evidence” of British Prime Minister David Cameron’s “disregard” for the 1998 “Good Friday” peace agreement signed by Great Britain and the IRA.

Sinn Fein claims that under the agreement, the British government should no longer be pursuing IRA members for actions taken during the war in Northern Ireland.

From 1970 to 1997, the IRA is estimated to have killed almost 1,800 people.  Sinn Fein official Gerry Kelly, (who himself reportedly led IRA car-bomb attacks in London in 1973), asserted that Downey had been informed in 2007 that he was no longer wanted for questioning by British police, according to the IrishCentral newspaper.