A new investigation is to be held into one of the most notorious massacres in Northern Ireland's conflict amid mounting concern that it was carried out by police informers, using weapons that had been smuggled into the province with the assistance of the British authorities.
The police ombudsman for Northern Ireland, Michael Maguire, will on Thursday quash a report on the crime that was published by his predecessor last year and tell the high court in Belfast that he is to begin a fresh inquiry.
When it was published last year, the previous ombudsman's report was denounced as a whitewash by families of the six men who were shot dead in a loyalist attack on a Catholic-owned bar in Loughinisland, County Down, in June 1994.
Families of the dead men responded to the report by undertaking civil proceedings against police in Northern Ireland and the Ministry of Defence, alleging that the weapons used in the shooting were among a large cache said to have been brought into Belfast with the connivance of military intelligence and MI5.
It is understood that the ombudsman will tell the court that the last report will be quashed "on the basis of particular matters which I have concluded … were not adequately pursued in the earlier investigation".
The new inquiry is expected to focus on the getaway car used in the massacre and the role that a police informer played in providing the vehicle to the loyalist gang that carried out the killings.
The six men who died at Loughinisland were Barney Green, 87, thought to have been the oldest person to die in the Northern Ireland conflict, his nephew Dan McCreanor, 59, and neighbours Malcolm Jenkinson, 53, Adrian Rogan, 34, Eamon Byrne, 39, and Patsy O'Hare, 35. Five men were seriously injured.