Police search for boys who went missing 35-years-ago

Police in Belfast have begun digging at a patch of land near a cemetery and nature reserve which may contain hidden graves.

The land is close to where two young boys disappeared 35-years-ago.

The land being searched, near Belfast's main Catholic cemetery, was owned by the Church but was then sold to the Ulster Wildlife Trust who run the adjacent Bog Meadows nature reserve.

Hundreds of babies born between 1940 and 1980 were buried there and their parents raised an outcry.

A team of experts from Queens University began searching the nature reserve for the babies' graves and reported what's being called an anomaly.

The police were then called in and are now digging specifically for the graves of John Rodgers, aged 13, and Thomas Spence, 11, who went missing from their homes nearby in 1974.

Eight-years-ago a dig at the home of a convicted paedophile in the area yielded nothing.