McCANN AND OTHERS v. THE UNITED KINGDOM JUDGMENT JOINT DISSENTING OPINION OF JUDGES RYSSDAL, BERNHARDT, THÓR VILHJÁLMSSON, GÖLCÜKLÜ, PALM, PEKKANEN, SIR JOHN FREELAND, BAKA AND JAMBREK 60 The judgment does not, however, go on to say that it would have been practicable for the authorities to have arrested and detained the suspects at that stage. Rightly so, in our view, because at that stage there might not be sufficient evidence to warrant their detention and trial. To release them, after having alerted them to the state of readiness of the authorities, would be to increase the risk that they or other IRA members could successfully mount a renewed terrorist attack on Gibraltar. In the circumstances as then known, it was accordingly not "a serious miscalculation" for the authorities to defer the arrest rather than merely stop the suspects at the border and turn them back into Spain. 12. Paragraph 206 of the judgment then lists certain "key assessments" made by the authorities which, in paragraph 207, are said to have turned out, in the event, to be erroneous, although they are accepted as all being possible hypotheses in a situation where the true facts were unknown and where the authorities were operating on the basis of limited intelligence information. Paragraph 208 goes on to make the criticism that "insufficient allowances appear to have been made for other assumptions". 13. As a first example to substantiate this criticism, the paragraph then states that since the bombing was not expected until 8 March "there was equally the possibility that the ... terrorists were on a reconnaissance mission". There was, however, nothing unreasonable in the assessment at the operational briefing on 5 March that the car which would be brought into Gibraltar was unlikely, on the grounds then stated, to be a "blocking" car (see paragraph 23, point e). So, when the car had been parked in the assembly area by one of the suspects and all three had been found to be present in Gibraltar, the authorities could quite properly operate on the working assumption that it contained a bomb and that, as the suspects were unlikely to risk two visits, it was not "equally" possible that they were on a reconnaissance mission. In addition, Soldier F, the senior military adviser to the Gibraltar Commissioner of Police, gave evidence to the inquest that, according to intelligence information, reconnaissance missions had been undertaken many times before: reconnaissance was, he had been told, complete and the operation was ready to be run. In these circumstances, for the authorities to have proceeded otherwise than on the basis of a worst-case scenario that the car contained a bomb which was capable of being detonated by the suspects during their presence in the territory would have been to show a reckless failure of concern for public safety. 14. Secondly, it is suggested in the second sub-paragraph of paragraph 208 that, at the briefings or after the suspects had been spotted, "it might have been thought unlikely that they would have been prepared to explode the bomb, thereby killing many civilians, as Mr McCann and Ms Farrell