Posted: 18:37, September 8, 2022 | Updated: 20:00, 8 September 2022
As the world remembers the extraordinary life of Queen Elizabeth II, Australians can remember the “greatest unsolved mystery” of her reign – an assassination attempt just outside Sydney more than 50 years ago. Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip were traveling from Sydney to Orange, in central west South Wales, as part of their tour of Australia in 1970 when they fell victim to the ‘Lithgow Plan’. The royal couple were traveling in the Blue Mountains on the Commissioner’s Train on April 29, 1970, when about halfway through their journey the train stopped. Queen Elizabeth II narrowly avoided an assassination attempt while traveling from Sydney to Orange in 1970 (pictured with the royal couple arriving in Sydney in 1970) The 1970 assassination attempt, more than 50 years before Her Majesty’s death, was hidden for almost 40 years Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip didn’t know it at the time, but they narrowly escaped death thanks to the slow pace of the train. Former Detective Superintendent Cliff McHardy said the would-be killers had placed a large log on the train tracks where the royal couple were to pass, in the hope of derailing the locomotive. Fortunately, the driver had immediately applied the brakes to the slow-moving train, causing the train to slide nearly 700 feet before stopping at a level crossing. The train remained on its track and suffered no significant damage. A security train that traveled to the area an hour before the royals did not see the log. “Had the train reached its normal speed, it would have plunged off the tracks and into an embankment. My investigations have shown that the log was deliberately placed on the tracks,” Mr McHardy told the Daily Mail in 2009. The ‘Lithgow Plan’ saw the would-be assassins place a large log over the train tracks that the Queen and Prince traveled on (the Queen was pictured greeting people outside the Town Hall in Sydney in May 1970) Due to the timing of the plan, it is suspected that the assassination attempt was planned with the help of insiders and possibly orchestrated by supporters of the Australian Irish Democratic Army. He added that the entire effort was hidden from both the public and the royal family for nearly 40 years to save the Australian government from embarrassment. Mr McHardy, who was the investigating officer on the case, said he decided to reveal the truth to help crack the “biggest unsolved mystery of my career”. The assassination attempt is believed to have been orchestrated by supporters of the Australian Irish Democratic Army (pictured, the Queen in Sydney in May 1970) While he understands why the attempt had to be kept secret, the former detective said the cover-up of the attempted murder meant police would never be able to hunt down the criminals. “We never came up with any decent suspects because if we interviewed people it seemed like we were talking in riddles,” he said. “We couldn’t disclose what our investigations were.”
