Search winding down for McVeigh body

Gardaí were tonight winding down their latest search near the border for the remains of Columba McVeigh, one of the “disappeared” – people who vanished after being kidnapped and murdered by the IRA over a period dating back more than 30 years.

A new bid to find the body of teenager Mr McVeigh was started near the Co Monaghan village of Emyvale earlier this month after the IRA relayed fresh information to Ireland’s Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains.

A team of gardaí using an mechanical digger moved in to the scene, but almost two-weeks of excavations at the mountainside bogland in the vicinity proved fruitless.

The operation was expected to be formally called off on Sunday after final checks around the area of the search, which was concentrated close to an spot examined in detail in earlier bids to find Mr McVeigh.

The latest search for the murdered youth got under way 10 days after what are thought to be the remains of another of the disappeared, Belfast woman Jean McConville were found, reportedly by accident, on Shelling Hill beach in Co Louth.

Earlier searches of another beach in the same area for Mrs McConville had proved unsuccessful.

Mrs McConville, a mother of 10, was abducted from her Belfast home by an IRA gang in 1972. She was accused by the terrorists of helping a British soldier who was fatally wounded during a gunbattle with the IRA near Belfast’s Divis Flats complex.