Pensioner questioned in McConville investigation

A pensioner has been questioned about the 1972 murder of Jean McConville, a mother of 10 abducted, shot dead, and then secretly buried by the IRA.

The man, aged 77, was detained at his home in the Andersonstown area of west Belfast yesterday.

He was taken to the custody suite at Antrim to be interviewed by officers from the PSNI’s serious crime branch.

Mrs McConville, 37, was seized at her home at Divis Flats beside the Falls Road in Belfast by an IRA gang in December 1972 and dragged from her children after being accused of passing information to the British Army.

An investigation later carried out by the Northern Ireland Police Ombudsman emphatically rejected the allegations.

Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams has consistently denied having anything to do with her disappearance or that he belonged to the IRA, even though disaffected former members claimed he ordered the kidnapping.

Nobody has ever been charged with the murder.

Police said they could not comment further on the arrest, but it is believed officers were acting on new information. The man detained has not been named.

Mrs McConville was a Protestant who converted to Catholicism after she married a Catholic man, a former British soldier.

She was kidnapped by up to a dozen IRA men and women, later shot in the back of the head, and buried 50 miles from her home. The IRA did not admit her murder until 1999 when information was passed on to gardaí. Her remains were found on a beach in Co Louth, in August 2003.