Michael McConville, son of Jean McConville, who was murdered by the IRA in 1972, speaks to the media[PA]They said, ‘If you tell anyone anything about the IRA, we will come back and shoot you or one of your family’.
Michael McConville was only 11 when the gang burst into their home and dragged away his widowed mother Jean as he and his brothers and sisters vainly struggled to hold on to her.
He recognised members of the hit squad, but cannot identify them for fear of bloody revenge by the IRA.
He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “They said, ‘If you tell anyone anything about the IRA, we will come back and shoot you or one of your family’.”
Mr McConville added: “I would not tell the police. Either me, one of my family or one of my children would be killed.
“People think all this has gone away but it has not.
“I have a young family. I don’t want anything to happen to them.”
He was speaking hours after Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams was arrested over the murder when he voluntarily went to a police station in Antrim on Wednesday night. Adams, 65, said later: “I believe that the killing of Jean McConville and the secret burial of her body was wrong and a grievous injustice to her and her family.
“Well-publicised, malicious allegations have been made against me. I reject these.
“While I have never disassociated myself from the IRA and I never will, I am innocent of any part in the abduction, killing or burial of Mrs McConville.”
The 37-year-old mother-of-10 was at her home in Divis Flats, west Belfast, when the IRA gang of up to 12 men and women burst in.
Her son recalled how she was in an “awful state” having been snatched from a bingo hall the previous night, accused of being a British Army informer and badly beaten.
Hours later, she was taken from her home, shot in the head and buried on a beach in County Louth – becoming one of the “Disappeared” victims of the Troubles.
A week later, Michael was snatched and taken to a house where he was hooded and beaten with sticks.
He says some of his attackers had been involved in the kidnap and murder of his mother.Even though his “blood boils” when he sees his mother’s killers in the street, Mr McConville is convinced the reprisal threat will be carried out.
But Jean’s eldest daughter Helen McKendry said last night she is prepared to name the people responsible for her mother’s death.
“What are they going to do to me? They have done so much to me in the last 42 years,” she told BBC2’s Newsnight.
IRA chiefs did not officially admit responsibility for the murder until 1999 and it was another four years before her remains were found.
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