The Federal Bureau of Investigation in the United States has released a new dossier describing an assassination attempt on the late Queen Elizabeth II during her visit to California in 1983.
The conspiracy was discovered by the FBI on February 4, 1983, a month before the monarch’s official visit to the United States with her late husband, Prince Philip.
The threats were made by a man seeking retribution for his daughter who was “killed in Northern Ireland by a rubber bullet,” according to the documents that were made accessible on the Bureau’s information website, the Vault.
Following a Freedom of Information Act request made to the Bureau by US news media following the queen’s passing last year, the documents were made publicly available earlier this week.
The 102-paged document read in part, “He was going to attempt to harm Queen Elizabeth and would do this either by dropping some object off the Golden Gate Bridge onto the Royal Yacht Britannia when it sails underneath, or would attempt to kill Queen Elizabeth when she visited Yosemite National Park.”
The Secret Service had intended to close the walkways on the Golden Gate Bridge as the yacht carrying the queen approached. Despite the warning, Her Majesty’s visit went off without a hitch.
Several assassination attempts have been made against the Queen during her decades-long reign. In December 2021, a guy named Jaswant Singh Chail stormed into Windsor Castle with a crossbow and informed police he was going to assassinate the monarch.
Chail, who was 19 at the time, released a TikTok video of himself expressing his plans to avenge the colonial-era Amritsar slaughter of 1919 in India less than an hour before his arrest.
On September 8, 2022, the Queen died, nine months after the tragedy.
Chail was charged with attempting to “injure the person of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, making threats to kill, and possessing an offensive weapon” when he was arraigned in February 2023.
