Three IRA members die in a hail of SAS gunfire on a Gibraltar street in March 1988, and this Thames Television investigation asks whether they were given any chance to surrender. Reporters track down eyewitnesses who watched the shooting of Mairéad Farrell, Daniel McCann, and Seán Savage, several of whom describe hands raised and no warning shouted before the shots. The program lays out the discrepancy between the government's account, that the three were about to detonate a car bomb near a British military band, and the fact that no detonator or explosives were on their bodies when they died. Interviews build a case that the operation looked less like an arrest gone wrong than a planned killing. The British government tried to have the broadcast stopped before it aired, and the fallout was immediate: a Thames Television inquiry, a media storm over press freedom, and a controversy widely blamed for costing Thames its ITV franchise a few years later. The film's real subject is what a state owes even people it calls terrorists.