Three charged over killing of Martin O’Hagan

THREE MEN have appeared in court in Northern Ireland charged with the murder of reporter Martin O’Hagan. It was a week before the seventh anniversary of the killing on September 28 that police began a series of arrests that have seen nine men and a woman questioned.

The men are Neil Hyde, Nigel Leckey, and Drew Robert King. Nigel Leckey is also charged with possessing ammunition. Two other men have been charged with lesser offences related to the killing. Drew King’s brother, Robin Andrew King, and Mark Kennedy, are charged with disposing of or concealing the getaway car. All deny the charges.

Martin O’Hagan was a Belfast-based investigative reporter for the Dublin Sunday World who had built a reputation for breaking paramilitary and drug-dealing stories.

He was gunned down in front of his wife Marie outside their home in Lurgan as they returned from an evening in his local pub.

The murder was claimed by the Red Hand Defenders, a cover name used by both the Loyalist Volunteer Force and the Ulster Defence Association.

The charges follow investigations by the Police Service of Northern Ireland’s Retrospective Murder Review Team, set up to work independently on sectarian killings during the 25-year war that the former Royal Ulster Constabulary had failed to solve. A bail hearing at the Belfast High Court in October was told that the arrests were based on information a man identified as Witness A had given to police more than a year ago.

Mr Justice McLaughlin said at the hearing that the murder was “a particularly abhorrent assassination, an attack on the liberty of the press, an attack on the human right to life and had heavy sectarian overtones”.