Long-awaited watchdog report into Kingsmill massacre due to be released
By David Young, PA
A long-awaited police watchdog report into one of the most notorious incidents of the Troubles – the Kingsmill Massacre – is due to be released.
Ten Protestant men were shot dead when republican gunmen posing as British soldiers ordered them off a minibus on their way home from work outside the village of Kingsmill in Co Armagh in January 1976.
The killers asked the occupants of the bus their religion before opening fire.
The only Catholic on board was ordered to run away before the shooting started.
Of the 11 Protestants who remained on the roadside, one man, Alan Black, survived, despite being shot 18 times.
Mr Black, who is now in his early 80s, will be among those attending the office of the North's Police Ombudsman Marie Anderson in Belfast on Tuesday morning to receive her report into the atrocity.
Her investigation focused on the Royal Ulster Constabulary’s handling of the original police investigation.
No-one has ever been convicted of the murders.
The Provisional IRA long denied responsibility for the sectarian killings, with the attack instead claimed by a little-known paramilitary group calling itself the South Armagh Republican Action Force.
That group was long viewed as a front for the IRA, which was supposedly on ceasefire at the time.
Last year, a coroner agreed with that assessment and, delivering his findings in a long-running inquest, ruled that the massacre was an “overtly sectarian attack by the IRA”.
The 10 men who died were Robert Chambers (18), John Bryans (46), Reginald Chapman (29), Walter Chapman (35), Robert Freeburn (50), Joseph Lemmon (46), John McConville (20), James McWhirter (58), Robert Walker (46) and Kenneth Worton (24).
