The Slovak Three[1][note 1] were Irishmen Michael Christopher McDonald, Declan John Rafferty and Fintan Paul O'Farrell,[2] who were members of the Real IRA. They were arrested in a sting operation in Slovakia conducted by British security agency MI5 in 2001 after they were caught attempting to buy arms for their campaign. They believed they were purchasing weapons from Iraqi intelligence agents and that Saddam Hussein was to play a role in the Real IRA similar to the one Colonel Gaddafi had in its predecessors the Provisional IRA. The three men met in Piešťany, a spa town in Western Slovakia, after months of meetings and telephone calls—all of which were intercepted and overheard by MI6. Believing its case to be now fireproof, MI5 had passed details of the men and their intentions to the Slovak authorities, who ambushed the men on the evening of 5 July 2001 after their meeting. They were arrested and imprisoned in the expectation Slovakia would receive a formal extradition request from the UK.
McDonald, Rafferty and O'Farrell were extradited; at Woolwich Crown Court, London, they were tried and sentenced to 30 years imprisonment. Unusually for IRA men in British courts, they pleaded guilty. In 2006 they were transferred to Ireland to serve the remainder of their sentences in Portlaoise Prison. In 2014, however, it was discovered that some prisoners who had been transferred from the English penal system to the Irish one had not had their warrants adjusted to take into account Ireland's lack of any facility to release prisoners on licence. This resulted in anomalies between the lengths of their original sentences and what they were expected to serve in Ireland; after an appeal, the Irish High Court released McDonald, Rafferty and O'Farrell in September 2014.
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