UN inspectors 'needed in the North'

United Nations inspectors were today urged to visit Northern Ireland in a new bid to prove allegations that the Army operated a shoot-to-kill policy during two ambushes on IRA men.

Civil rights group Relatives for Justice also claimed loyalists who murdered a pensioner in another attack in the Co Tyrone area were conspiring with the security forces.

Inquests into all three cases involving killings going back more than a decade have been blocked because Defence and police chiefs refuse to provide material to the families’ lawyers, the grouping said.

Campaigners want the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Summary and Arbitrary Executions to travel on a fact-finding mission about the shootings in Co Tyrone.

A spokesman said: “It is the firm view of the families that the inquest court is not the correct forum in which highly contested killings such as these should be examined.

“It is in this context that the request has been made under the mandate of the office of the Rapporteur.”

The first of the cases involves IRA men Tony Doris, Lawrence McNally and Peter Ryan, who were shot dead by the SAS as they drove through the village of Coagh in a stolen car on June 3, 1991.

It is believed the men were planning an attack when the soldiers opened fire.

Relatives for Justice has also posed questions about the SAS killings of Provos Kevin Barry O’Donnell, Peter Clancy, Sean O’Farrell and Daniel Vincent at Clonoe near Coalisland on February 16, 1992.

Minutes earlier they had used a heavy machine gun to open fire on the local RUC station.

The third case involves the murder of Roseanne Mallon, 76, by loyalists in her home near Dungannon, Co Tyrone on May 8, 1994.

The Ulster Volunteer Force claimed it had been trying to kill nephews of the dead woman who had served prison sentences.

Relatives for Justice claim a covert Army unit had been observing the Mallon house using sophisticated surveillance cameras at the time of the shooting but had decided not to intervene.

Sinn Féin has backed the group’s campaign to bring the UN Rapporteur to Northern Ireland.

Mid Ulster MP Martin McGuinness said: “The inquests into the killings in Coagh, Clonoe and in the case of Roseanne Mallon are continuing to be obstructed by the Police Service of Northern Ireland refusing to hand over material requested by the lawyers.

“In light of this obstruction and the fact that we are a decade on from the killings, the families feel that the only way that the circumstances can be investigated satisfactorily is through this sort of UN intervention.”