Shooting victims suspected of murder
As video footage taken minutes before Protestant David McDowell was battered to death was released, the detective heading the hunt urged witnesses to testify.
Just days after the 34-year-old shift worker was killed, near one of the city’s peace lines, a number of republican punishment attacks were carried out.
Chief Superintendent Phil Wright said: “We are treating them as the firm suspects, but we have no evidence to put before the courts.”
Mr McDowell was carrying a headboard to a house he was preparing to move into when he was attacked and left to die in the loyalist Shankill Road area on August 16 last year.
Pleading for help in catching the killers, his brother Samuel told how the murder had taken a terrible toll on his family.
In an emotionally charged appeal, he said: “This has been torture for us all.
“My father died in March from cancer but we believe his heart was broken after David’s murder.”
Mr McDowell insisted his brother, who lived alone, had no enemies and was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
“It doesn’t matter what community they came from, they killed David and we just want justice.”
Detectives believe a light-coloured car spotted near the junction of Lanark Way and the Shankill Road where the body was found may be the same vehicle as a white Audi found on fire in the city’s Ardoyne district.
Mr Wright - Belfast's top detective, who is also heading the police probe into the raid on Special Branch files at the Castlereagh complex - refused to accept that members of the republican community would not give the police the information needed to apprehend the killers.
“Until individuals are prepared to come forward and do what’s morally right then we are going to have murders, whether sectarian or not, which will go unsolved,” he said.
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