An Irish National Liberation Army activist who killed three people, including two young boys, in a bombing in 1987, has died after he was found shot in a Belfast cemetery.
Martin McElkerney had been in intensive care at Belfast’s Royal Victoria hospital since Thursday afternoon after he was found lying critically wounded near the Irish Republican Socialist plot in the city’s Milltown cemetery.
Friends of the former INLA prisoner said a shotgun had been found by his side in the graveyard. No one else was involved in the fatal shooting and a crime is not suspected.
Police and paramedics had rushed to the cemetery after reports of shots being fired near the spot where a number of dead INLA members are interred. McElkerney was taken to hospital by an air ambulance helicopter team.
A Northern Ireland ambulance service spokesman told the Belfast Telegraph: “We received a call at 1.53pm and attended the scene following a report of an incident at Milltown cemetery. We dispatched two emergency crews to the scene. The charity air ambulance and HEMS [helicopter emergency medical service] team also attended. One person was transported to Royal Victoria hospital.”
McElkerney was jailed in 1987 for a bomb attack five years earlier in the Divis flats complex in west Belfast. Kevin Valliday, 11, and his friend Stephen Bennett, 14, were killed by the remote-controlled bomb.
L/Bdr Kevin Waller, 20, a British soldier with the Royal Artillery Regiment on a foot patrol in the flats, also died as a result of the blast. Another soldier suffered life-changing injuries as a result of the bomb.
