The families of eight victims of the Birmingham pub bombings have had no contact with the reopened inquest into their deaths, a hearing in the city has been told.
Efforts to trace the families have been unsuccessful, Peter Thornton QC, the chief coroner for England and Wales, said on Monday. He appealed to relatives of the eight to come forward if they wished to be involved.
The inquest was reopened earlier this year after Louise Hunt, the senior coroner for Birmingham and Solihull, said she had serious concerns that police may have failed to act on advance warnings about the attacks.
Lawyers representing a further eight families told the hearing they had yet to receive any funding, while lawyers for a ninth said they had received limited funding but that no money appeared to be available for future work.
Both said the situation compared unfavourably with the inquest into the deaths of 96 people killed in the 1989 Hillsborough disaster, during which the Home Office provided some discretionary funding for families’ legal teams.
Thornton said he supported the application for funding.
Twenty-one people died when the IRA bombed two pubs in Birmingham in November 1974. It was one of the deadliest terrorist attacks in British history. More than 180 people were injured, many seriously.
The following year, six men – now known as the Birmingham Six – were convicted of the attacks and sentenced to life imprisonment. In 1991, however, their convictions were quashed, in an acknowledgment of what is now seen as one of the UK’s worst miscarriages of justice.
The hearing was adjourned until February, and the full inquests are expected to begin next September.
