Murder of Jean McConville

Jean McConville (née Murray; 7 May 1934 – December 1972)^[1] was a woman from Belfast, Northern Ireland, who was kidnapped and murdered by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) and secretly buried in County Louth in the Republic of Ireland in 1972 after being accused by the IRA of passing information to British forces.^[2][3]

In 1999, the IRA acknowledged that it had killed McConville and eight others of the "Disappeared".^[4] It claimed she had been passing information about republicans to the British Army in exchange for money and that a transmitter had been found in her flat.^[5][6] A report by the Police Ombudsman found no evidence for this or other rumours.^[7]

Before the Troubles, the IRA had a policy of killing informers within its own ranks. From the start of the conflict the term informer was also used for civilians who were suspected of providing information on paramilitary organisations to the security forces. Other Irish republican and loyalist paramilitaries also carried out such killings.^[8] As she was a recently-widowed mother of ten, the McConville killing was particularly controversial. Her body was not found until 2003, and the crime has not been solved. The Police Ombudsman found that the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) did not begin to investigate the disappearance properly until 1995.