A DOCUMENTARY to be shown tonight, Monday, will ask whether a rogue IRA unit made up of Englishmen could be responsible for the Warrington bombings.

BBC’s Inside Out programme focuses on the attacks on Bridge Street in March 1993 which killed Tim Parry and Johnathan Ball.

And it asks why there has never been any convictions.

Presenter Peter Marshall said: “The bombing here is still the biggest case ever handled by Cheshire Police.

“Yet, two decades later, no-one has ever been brought to justice for this crime which took the lives of two children - Johnathan Ball and Tim Parry.

“This programme investigates why the case has never been solved, and asks if the security services were looking in the right places, at the right times at the right people.”

The IRA claimed responsibility for the attack and most people accepted perceived wisdom that the bombs were planted in retaliation for arrests made just three weeks earlier following a botched bombing attempt at the gas works on Winwick Road.

However the programme argues that with hindsight the reprisal explanation no longer makes sense.

It also highlights the fact that in the space of five months - either side of the Warrington bombing - republican terrorists had sanctioned Englishmen to carry out their campaigns; that peace talks were under way three days after the Bridge Street bombing; and a recognised codeword was not used.

And the programme tracks down a former IRA Commander in the UK who refused to be interviewed on camera but tells the programme he had no “special knowledge,” about the Warrington bombing.

Mr Marshall added: “If the man who allegedly headed the IRA’s terror campaign in England can’t tell us who bombed Warrington, then questions remain.

“Could a rogue active service unit - comprised of Englishmen - have been operating on the mainland in 1993?

“Supported by the IRA, but operating independently and driven by left wing political extremism? With access to explosives but short of codewords? A tiny group of loose cannons unaware of peace talks? Perhaps, what’s known as cleanskins - the sort of bombers most feared by the security services because there’s no intelligence?”

Tim Parry’s father, Colin, said: “We met Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams, separately, and asked both if they knew “Why Warrington?” and whether they knew who’d carried out the attacks in Warrington and both said they didn’t know.

"Now if your next question is did we believe them - well the simple answer is no, we didn’t believe them but we hardly expected either to give us an explanation as to Why Warrington? But inevitably it was a question we would put to them.

"This is an interesting theory which we haven’t heard before or ever contemplated before, but if you sit back and look at it objectively this could be the way it was.“ The programme will be shown at 7.30pm on BBC One.