Sentence will be passed today, Thursday on the former member of the British Army convicted of the manslaughter of Co Tyrone man Aidan McAnespie at a Border checkpoint in 1988. Fifty-three-year-old David Jonathan Holden was due to be sentenced at Belfast Crown Court on Friday last but presiding judge Mr Justice O’Hara said he had a number of issues to consider in the case and would hear pleas from counsel before issuing his sentence at the next hearing. Aidan McAnespie, 23, was shot in the back from a British Army checkpoint in Aughnacloy on the Tyrone/Monaghan border while on his way to a GAA match.
David Holden, who was 18 at the time and serving in the Grenadier Guards, claimed the shooting had been an accident. He said it happened as he handled his weapon with wet gloves and his finger slipped onto the trigger. Convicting Holden of manslaughter at a previous hearing, the judge ruled that he had pointed a machine gun at Mr McAnespie from an observation sanger in the checkpoint and pulled the trigger, assuming the weapon was not cocked and ready for use.
That was an assumption he should never have made and as a result he was guilty of manslaughter “by gross negligence”, the judge stated. Mr Justice O’Hara said that the former soldier’s account of the incident was “deliberately false”, citing expert evidence that it took nine pounds of pressure on the trigger to fire the weapon. During the trial, the court was told that Mr McAnespie was a “person of interest” to the security forces.
He had complained of regular harassment at the checkpoint and often parked his car and walked through the checkpoint to the GAA grounds to avoid lengthy delays caused by searches of his vehicle. Mr Holden is the first former soldier to be convicted of a historical offence since the Good Friday Agreement and it is believed that he could benefit from the agreement’s early release scheme for prisoners and serve a maximum of two years.
During the sentence hearing on Friday, defence barrister Frank O’Donoghue argued that it was exceptional for an 18-year-old to be charged and convicted of…
