By Sean O'Driscoll
21 January 2005
An Irish-American lobby group has called on the Bush administration to ban Margaret Thatcher's son from entering the US after he pleaded guilty to providing a helicopter which was to be used in a failed coup d'etat in central Africa.
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He said that if Irish persons have been banned from entering the US "for far lesser reasons", then Mr Thatcher should also be banned.
In the latest development, a group of British MPs is attempting to take away Mark Thatcher's hereditary baronetcy for his part in the African coup plot.
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Father McManus said that the Bush administration was already paying $$293m for Iraqi security contracts to a company owned by Tim Spicer, a close friend of one of the alleged coup leaders, Simon Mann.
Spicer was head of an army unit in Northern Ireland that shot and killed a 19-year-old west Belfast teenager.
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The two were the only British soldiers ever to be convicted of murder for an on-duty killing in Northern Ireland.
Spicer's Sandline Corporation nearly brought down Prime Minister Tony Blair's government after it was revealed that it was exporting weapons to Sierra Leone during the country's civil war.
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