Flaws in the investigation into a GAA man's killing are likely to be identified, writes Gerry Moriarty
The murder of Seán Brown, abducted and shot by loyalist paramilitaries as he locked up the Wolfe Tone GAA club premises in Bellaghy, Co Derry, in May 1997, caused shock and revulsion.
Mr Brown, a 61-year-old father of six, was an instructor at the Institute of Mechanical Engineering in Ballymena, a driving force behind the Wolfe Tone club and a respected figure in the general community.
A poem from a 12-year-old Protestant girl who lived near Mr Brown was read out at his funeral.
Its final lines were:
"Seán was a very good neighbour and a very good friend too
All the love in my heart goes out to his family."
The poet Seamus Heaney, the Nobel literature prizewinner and a native of Bellaghy, was in Greece at the time. But, as recorded in the book Lost Lives, he wrote to the Irish News to pay tribute to Mr Brown.
He described the killing as shocking and "sinister". He had heard the news in Olympia and, given Mr Brown's involvement in sport, he "could not help thinking of his death as a crime against the ancient Olympic spirit".
He wrote: "The Greeks recognised that there was something sacrosanct about the athletic ideal and regarded any violence during the period of the games as sacrilegious."
Seamus Heaney also recalled how the previous year Mr Brown had presided over a local event celebrating Heaney's Nobel Prize for Literature, and how it was particularly important for him that both sides of the community attended.
"He represented something better than we have grown used to, something not quite covered by the word 'reconciliation' because that word has become a policy word - official and public.
"This was more like a purification, a release from what the Greeks called the miasma, the stain of spilled blood. It is a terrible irony that the man who organised such an event should die at the hands of a sectarian killer," Heaney wrote.
Last night, Sinn Féin MP Mr Martin McGuinness said he hoped that the Police Ombudsman's report would provide some answers for the Brown family.
"The Brown family have been campaigning for a number of years in their search for answers surrounding the murder of Seán Brown at Bellaghy GAA club in 1997. There has been a widely held belief locally that the circumstances of the killing were not investigated properly," he said.
At the time of the killing, some nationalist politicians and local people in Bellaghy raised questions as to how the killers, travelling in at least two cars, including Mr Brown's, felt sufficiently confident to risk avoiding security road checks and to also drive their injured or dead victim past Toomebridge RUC station in Co Antrim, with its sophisticated surveillance equipment.
While this gave rise to some nationalist allegations of security force collusion with the LVF killers, Ms O'Loan's report will make no such claims, it is understood.
"The focus will be on the flawed nature of the investigation," one source told The Irish Times.
The report, however, may trigger renewed allegations of collusion.