Talk:Ralph Cairns

Construction of the landmine.

Page 156 (Case Number 18) of Nachman Ben-Yehuda's "Political Assassinations by Jews: A Rhetorical Device for Justice" gives a detailed description of the construction of the remote-controlled landmine used to kill Cairns and Barker: "Eliav and his men constructed a mine consisting of fifteen kilograms blasting gelatin, six detonators with accelerators plus five kilograms of metal pieces. All of this deadly explosive contraption was wired with a twenty meter electric wire to an operator, and buried in the ground underneath the path which Cairns used to take in Gan Rehavia. The device was installed on Friday night (2300), the 25th of August, 1939."     ←   ZScarpia   12:27, 18 September 2022 (UTC)

MI5

To editor Porter Street: In this 2018 edit] you added some references to MI5 files without providing citations. Later edits made it appear that books by Ben-Yehuda and Golan were the source, but those books were published earlier than the year (2017) you say the MI5 files were opened. Please provide a source or we will need to remove it. Notifying @ZScarpia:. Zero^talk 12:38, 18 September 2022 (UTC)

Doesn't look promising: a registered account with no user page, no user talkpage and only one edit.     ←   ZScarpia   13:10, 18 September 2022 (UTC)

Could be a press report, see this near-miss. It's not in the book of Shindler mentioned at the end. Zero^talk 15:04, 18 September 2022 (UTC)

Somewhere I have a book whose subject matter is post-WWII British military and civil intelligence gathering, but, like most of my books, it's packed away in big house-moving boxes. It goes into a lot of detail on events in Palestine and Syria (and attempts to foil French support for Zionist terrorism), so would probably cover the killing of Cairns and Barker. Unfortunately, I read it years ago and can't remember its title. It's not been in any of the boxes I've opened up so far.     ←   ZScarpia   14:15, 19 September 2022 (UTC)

I suspect that the book I was referring to above was James Barr's "Line in the Sand: Britain, France and the Struggle that Shaped the Middle East." I've searched it and haven't been able to find any references to Cairns (though there are a lot of references to MI5). I've also drawn a blank searching John Newsinger's "British Counterinsurgency, From Palestine to Northern Ireland".     ←   ZScarpia   13:27, 20 September 2022 (UTC)