andy bell

In May 1981, Searchlight broke one of the most important stories it has ever investigated. British nazis were planning to bomb the Notting Hill carnival. They were thwarted by Searchlight’s mole, Ray Hill, who had infiltrated the plot. Here’s the inside story

When Ray Hill boarded the Paris metro on the evening of 20 April 1981 he believed he was on his way to a routine birthday celebration for Adolf Hitler. He’d been invited over “to meet some of the comrades” by a French fascist called Alex Oumow when they met at the Brighton home of the notorious Hancock family, themselves lifelong fascists and printers to the entire far right. The previous night in Paris he had stayed at the flat of a French-Vietnamese fascist called Yann Tran Long, whose apartment was a veritable arsenal of guns and ammunition. The next morning, Ray couldn’t get out quickly enough. A Hitler birthday party, to which Oumow was now taking him, would be just so much light relief.

Alex Oumow (right) with Anthony Hancock in Brighton

Oumow led him to a nondescript backstreet restaurant with a large private dining room curtained off at the rear. Behind the curtain, already the worse for wear, were about 40 Nazis, members of the Faisceaux Nationalistes Europeans (FNE), all in uniform, noisily celebrating the fuhrer’s birthday.

Ray’s standing on the British far right at the time was considerable so he was led straight to the top table and placed next to an older Nazi who had a finger missing. After some introductory chat about the state of the British far right, this gentleman got to the point. The comrades in Italy, France and Germany had begun to fight back – with the bombings at Bologna, in Paris and at the Munich Oktoberfest. Now it was the turn of the Brits to do something meaningful.

What, asked Ray, did he have in mind? You must bomb Brixton, barked his companion and all around the table there were cheers of approval. The French, he said, could provide anything that was needed – explosives, detonators and timing devices. Were the British up to it? Ray was shaken but said he would take the idea back to England.

Of course, he had no intention of doing so, but Oumow had other ideas. Whilst in England he had made contact with Tony Malski, a deranged member of the neo-Nazi British Movement, and had been impressed. Ray was to contact Malski and tell him to get in touch about the bomb plan. Ray could hardly ignore the instruction, but he tried to minimise the chance of contact actually being made by just casually dropping it into his next conversation with Malski:

“Oh, by the way, Alex wants you to get in touch sometime.”

Tony Malski

It didn’t work. Shortly afterwards, Malski phoned Ray. He’d been in touch with Alex. He was excited:

“We’re going to do Notting Hill. We’ve already got the geli, all we need now are the detonators. We’ll give them a fucking Carnival to remember.”

They met a few days later. By now the plan had developed. They were also going to put two gunmen on the roofs of buildings overlooking the carnival. After the explosion, they would open fire hoping that black people would think the police were firing on them and react violently.

“We’ll turn the n*****s on the cops!” Malski exclaimed.

He was, he explained, going to Paris to pick up the detonators, travelling on the ferry over the Bank Holiday weekend. It was all arranged with Alex.

Things were getting serious. As far as Searchlight was concerned, this information plainly had to be placed in the hands of the authorities who could block Malski’s madcap scheme. Hopefully, they could also arrest him in the process of bringing back the detonators from France where, we presumed, he was to collect them from Yann Tran Long. With luck, Malski would put it down to a random search.

However, with no connection of our own to the security service, Searchlight had to approach a fellow journalist who had highly placed contacts in Customs & Excise, one of whom was their liaison with MI5. A few hours later, a gentleman ‘from the Home Office’ turned up at Searchlight’s London office and took delivery of a briefing note we had prepared. And that, we thought, would be that.

It wasn’t. The bank holiday weekend came and went. And then, on the Tuesday. Malski was again on the phone to Ray. “I’m back”. Ray was flabbergasted. “Successful trip?” he asked. It was, said Malski, without elaborating. We concluded that he must have returned with the detonators.

There was now only one option left: blow the whole story, even with the attendant risk that Ray’s cover would be blown as well. That risk now had to be taken. We contacted the Daily Mirror and they splashed the story on the front page: “Carnival Race War Plot”. The Shadow Home Secretary, Roy Hattersley, weighed in, demanding police action.

Malski was furious but wouldn’t speak to Ray about the Paris trip on the phone. Then the two had a falling out when Ray declined Malski’s offer to lead the National Socialist Action Party, which Malski had just set up.

So we had to wait until 1983, when we were filming The Other Face of Terror” and when Ray arranged to meet Malski in a west London pub – with Ray wired for sound and a secret camera across the bar.

They got on to the Paris trip and Malski offered an account which took us completely by surprise. He had, it seemed, been stopped not on his way back, but on the way out. And far from being arrested, or even questioned, he had been warned off:

“They said, ‘We know where you’re going. We know you’re going to pick up some things in Paris. We were tipped off to look for a bloke with your description, your name’.

“He said, ‘We’ve been tipped off you’re going to pick up some gear.’

“He said, ‘Don’t bring it back in’.

“Now, the only three that knew I was going over there to see him was Alex Ormouw… only him, Yann and me… And Alex was the one who introduced me to Yann in the first place”.

Ray Hill with Yann Tran Long

So, Searchlight’s intervention had stopped the bombing, though not in the way we had intended. Malski did not bring back the detonators because he was warned not to, following our information passed to the security service. And, providentially, he had completely forgotten that he had shared his travel plans with Ray who was, as a result, completely above suspicion.

Malski had concluded that as Yann lived in France and the leak had been to British Special Branch, the leak must have originated in the Brighton circle around the Hancocks and Alex Ormouw.

“It’s definitely someone on the south coast” he concluded.

“Definitely…” agreed Ray.

Ray’s film, The Other Face of Terror, where the details of the plot were exposed: