Queen and Duke 'almost got killed in Australia'

Sydney/London: They have remained unaware of the attempt on their lives for almost 40 years. But the British Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh came startlingly close to being assassinated on an official tour of Australia in 1970, a senior detective at the time has claimed.

Cliff McHardy, a retired detective superintendent, has described how unidentified conspirators put a log on a railway track in an attempt to derail the official train transporting the royal couple across Australia's Great Dividing Range.

Disaster was only averted because the driver was travelling unusually slowly, McHardy claimed. "If the train had reached its normal speed it would have plunged off the tracks and into an embankment," he said.

In the event, the log got caught beneath the train's wheels and the driver was able to bring it to a gentle halt at a level crossing.

McHardy claimed that the incident was covered up by the Australian government and the Queen and Duke were unaware to this day that anything untoward had happened.

The plot, allegedly hatched by Australian IRA sympathisers, came to light when McHardy, 81, decided to break his silence in an interview with his local newspaper. He said he wanted to clear up one of the great unsolved mysteries of his police career.

On April 29, 1970, the Queen and Duke were travelling by train from Sydney to the farming town of Orange. When the train entered a winding cutting near the Blue Mountains town of Lithgow, two hours to the west of Sydney, it struck a large log wedged across the rails, said McHardy.

He insisted that it was an act of deliberate sabotage to force the train off the tracks. The log was stuck beneath the front wheels for 200 yards before the train came to a halt. McHardy, who was in charge of the Lithgow police force for 11 years, said that his investigations had concluded that the log was deliberately placed on the tracks.

A security "sweeper" train checking the line an hour before the Queen's arrival had found nothing, leading him to deduce that the culprits had knowledge of the train's schedule. "The log had been moved on to the line in darkness, by one or two people who had prior knowledge of the area," he said.

After the near-miss, railway employees and local people were interviewed but no arrests were made. The Lithgow Mercury reported that IRA sympathisers were among those questioned.