By Harvey Day for Mailonline—
IRA informer Sean O’Callaghan who claimed to have thwarted a plot to kill Charles and Diana has died aged 63, a close friend has said.
It is understood the convicted republican killer died while swimming in a pool in Jamaica.
The Co Kerry native was in the Caribbean visiting his daughter.
O’Callaghan detailed the inner workings of the IRA in his best-selling book, The Informer, in 1999.
Senior republicans dismissed O’Callaghan as a Walter Mitty character whose claims were embellished or untrue.
O’Callaghan joined the IRA in the mid-1970s.
He was involved in various operations, including a 1974 mortar attack on the British Army’s base at Clogher in County Tyrone in which a female soldier was killed.
In 1974 O’Callaghan murdered Detective Inspector Peter Flanagan, an Ulster Catholic officer, by shooting him repeatedly with a handgun in a pub.
In 1976, aged 21, O’Callaghan ended his involvement with the Provisional IRA and moved to London.
By the end of the decade, he had turned informer and started providing information to the Irish Garda.
He was close friends with historian and author Ruth Dudley Edwards.
‘It’s beginning to hit the news that Sean O’Callaghan, the IRA killer who became an unpaid spy for the Gardai, has died,’ she said.
‘He drowned yesterday while swimming in a pool in Jamaica, where he was visiting his daughter.
‘He was a man of exceptional ability and courage, and he spent most of his life finding ways of atoning for the crimes he had committed before at 20 he realized he was fighting in a squalid sectarian war rather than a resistance movement.
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