Sinn Féin and the SDLP have backed a call for a United Nations investigation into three separate incidents in Co Tyrone which claimed the lives of seven IRA members and an elderly woman.
The Relatives for Justice group is to travel to Geneva later in the year to request that the UN Special Rapporteur on Summary and Arbitrary Executions examine the killings. Mr Mark Thompson, a member of the group, expressed confidence that the UN would take up the cases.
Relatives for Justice said that the IRA members were the victims of a British army/RUC "shoot-to-kill" policy and that 76-year-old Roseanne Mallon was murdered by loyalists colluding with members of the British security forces.
The killings of the IRA members go back over 10 years. In June 1991, in the village of Coagh, IRA members Tony Doris, Lawrence McNally and Peter Ryan were killed in an SAS-style ambush. The following February in 1992 at Clonoe near Coalisland Kevin Barry O'Donnell, Peter Clancy, Sean O'Farrell and Daniel Vincent were killed in a similar ambush.
The RUC was also involved in the killings, according to Relatives for Justice. The group is also seeking a UN inquiry into the loyalist killing of Roseanne Mallon at her home on the outskirts of Dungannon in May 1994.
Shortly after her killing, surveillance equipment was discovered near the Mallon home, which prompted allegations that the British army and RUC had colluded with loyalists in the murder.
Sinn Féin MPs Mr Gerry Adams, Mr Martin McGuinness, Ms Michelle Gildernew and Mr Pat Doherty and former SDLP Assembly members Mr Denis Haughey and Mr Tommy Gallagher, as well as other politicians, joined the Relatives for Justice group at a press conference in Cookstown, Co Tyrone, yesterday to press for the inquiry.
Mr Haughey said that the families were entitled to the truth behind the killings.
