The Loughgall ambush took place on 8 May 1987 in the village of Loughgall, County Armagh, Northern Ireland. An eight-man unit of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) launched an attack on the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) base in the village. An IRA member drove a digger with a bomb in its bucket through the perimeter fence, while the rest of the unit arrived in a van and fired on the building. The bomb exploded and destroyed almost half of the base. Soldiers from the British Army's Special Air Service (SAS) then returned fire both from within the base and from hidden positions around it in a pre-planned ambush, killing all of the attackers. Two of them were subsequently found to have been unarmed when they were killed. A civilian was also killed and another wounded by the SAS after unwittingly driving into the ambush zone and being mistaken for IRA attackers. The joint British Army/RUC operation was codenamed Operation Judy. It was the IRA's biggest loss of life in a single incident during the Troubles. Background and preparations The IRA's East Tyrone Brigade was active mainly in eastern County Tyrone and neighbouring parts of County Armagh. By the mid-1980s it had become one of the IRA's most aggressive formations. Members of the unit, such as Jim Lynagh and Pádraig McKearney, advocated a strategy of destroying bases and preventing them being rebuilt or repaired in an attempt to "deny ground" to British forces. In 1985, Patrick Joseph Kelly became its commander and began implementing the strategy. In 1985 and 1986, it carried out two major attacks on Royal Ulster Constabulary bases. The first was an attack on the RUC barracks in Ballygawley on 7 December 1985, in which two police officers were shot dead. The second was an attack on an RUC base at The Birches on 11 August 1986. In both attacks, the bases were raked with machine-gun fire and then severely damaged with homemade bombs. In the attack at The Birches, they had breached the base's perimeter fence with a digger that had a bomb in its bucket; it was planned to use the same tactic in an attack on the lightly-manned Loughgall base. The British security forces however had received intelligence weeks prior to the attack of the IRA's plan and at least 10 days before of the target. It has been alleged that the security forces