Human rights activists have called on the IRA to lift their threat against scores of people intimidated out of Northern Ireland during the conflict and allow them to come home.

Police in the US believed tonight they had found the dismembered body of an Irish nun who had been abducted by a 25-year-old man shortly after he had murdered his father.

US police are tonight hunting a man who abducted two nuns, one of them Irish, after killing his father in Georgia.