File gone to Northern DPP on death of girl in RUC car in 1991

The North's Police Ombudsman passed a file on the 1991 death of Portadown teenager Alice McLoughlin to the Director of Public Prosecutions in June 2005. Sixteen year old McLoughlin died in the early hours of 6 July 1991, after being taken to Craigavon Hospital in a policeman's car.

The policeman claimed he gave her a lift after a Friday night mini-Twelfth parade in Markethill. When he stopped in Portadown to use a bank machine he left her alone in the car, and she grabbed his police-issue weapon and shot herself. A 1992 inquest found she died from a gunshot wound, but did not say it was definitely self-inflicted.

Her family have always claimed the circumstances were suspicious, and commissioned forensic experts to examine police photographs of the car. The forensic report said the pattern of blood stains on the car interior "indicates that the victim was shot from behind ie from the direction of the centre of the rear seat." Alice was shot while sitting in front passenger seat, with her head turned in a position suggesting she was talking to someone in the back seat. Her body was slumped backwards between the two front seats, where the suicide scenario suggested she should have fallen forward.

"This is an unusual position to come to rest in unless some force was pulling her in that direction, such as somebody holding her hair from behind or the instinctive pushing reaction of an occupant in the driver's seat," the report said. The wound was above her right ear.

Her position made it very difficult to pull her right arm far enough back to shoot herself there. As Alice was left-handed, she would have found this even more difficult. The pistol which killed Alice was photographed after the incident upside down between the handbrake and nearside seat, beside its holster.

"It is curious that after such a violent action ie the shooting of a gun close to the head, it appears that the gun came to be found so very close to its holster," the report said. "I would have expected the gun to fall into one of the rear footwells."

One photo showed a lightly-bloodstained hairgrip still holding some hair on the floor. "Its position and the relative absence of blood could be an indication of a struggle rather than it being lost when the gun was fired," the report said.

There have been contradictions in statements of the RUC man involved. He claimed to have come across Alice, whom he said he did not know, drunk staggering along a country road outside Markethill after midnight. The autopsy showed her blood-alcohol level was less than half the safe limit for driving.

While Markethill is predominantly protestant, it is on the edge of strongly catholic territory where, in 1991, both the IRA and INLA were active.

No witnesses reported hearing shots in Portadown town centre on the night, but three in Markethill did. The family have been unable to access records of the bank machine. The printed records from Craigavon Hospital say Alice was admitted at 1.03am, which was changed by ball-point pen to 12.50am.

Before being interviewed by police, the policeman was allowed to wash himself. The McLoughlin family have always been highly critical of the police investigation into Alice's death.

Lurgan Loyalist Barrie Bradbury is spokesperson for the Justice for Alice campaign. "It seems there is a complete cover-up by senior RUC officers at the time, now retired," Bradbury said.

"This is deeper than the death of Alice McLoughlin. This goes into what was happening in Mid-Ulster at the time by rogue elements of the RUC."

Last year the Ombudsman's office opened an inquiry into the police investigation.

Anton McCabe