Family to sue Ministry of Defence over UDR weapon used in UDA murder

THE family of a Catholic man shot dead by loyalists in 1974 are to sue the British Ministry of Defence as one of the weapons used came from a British Army base used by the Ulster Defence Regiment.

Terence McCafferty was one of two men killed when UDA gunmen singled them out from their Protestant workmates before shooting them dead.

James McCloskey died along with McCafferty while three others were injured in the hail of gunfire.

The Catholic workers were forced to the back of a work hut in Rush Park, in Whiteabbey, in January 1974 before the unionist gang opened fire.

One of the weapons used in the assault was a Sterling submachine gun taken from a joint Ulster Defence Regiment/Territorial Army base in the north Armagh town of Lurgan in October 1972.

Notorious loyalist killer Robin Jackson (who was also a member of the British Army’s Ulster Defence Regiment) is said to have planned the raid in which 85 British Army self-loading rifles (SLRs) and 21 Sterling submachine guns were stolen. Most of the weapons were recovered soon after the raid but the rest remained under the control of both the main unionist death squads, the UDA and UVF, and were used in multiple killings.

Explaining why Terry McCafferty’s family have decided to sue the British Government, solicitor Kevin Winters said:

“With the Secretary of State making it clear that the [British] Government doesn’t want any more inquiries and the PSNI saying there are less resources to deal with the past, it is depressingly clear to these families that they must seek their own remedies.”

◼︎  In 2013, former BBC journalist Anne Cadwallader, now a case worker with the Pat Finucane Centre, published Lethal Allies: British Collusion in Ireland, in which she examined the involvement of the UDR and RUC with loyalist killer gangs operating in the Armagh, east Tyrone, north Louth and Monaghan areas.

And, in August, the Pat Finucane Centre published its Hidden History of the UDR: The Secret Files Revealed.

Both publications expose the fact that senior British politicians and top-ranking British Army officers were aware of the links between the UDR and loyalists yet chose to ignore this, effectively giving them the green light for a campaign of assassination, a licence to kill that claimed hundreds of lives including that of Terry McCafferty.