Strabane District Council has refused a family's request to exhume the remains of six unidentified bodies from a graveyard in an attempt to find their loved one who died more than 30 years ago.
The Slattery family now living in Fermanagh had requested that the council granted them permission to exhume the remains from six plots known as the ‘workhouse plot’ buried in Strabane Cemetery as they continue their search for 16-year-old Gerard Sla
ttery disappeared after leaving his home in Omagh to go to Mass in 1973.
Mr Slattery’s brother Paul who has been leading the search for his brother’s body had hoped that a body found in the River Foyle and buried in a Strabane workhouse grave was his brother’s.
The body recovered from the Foyle in February 1974 matched the description of the missing teenager.
Speaking in 2006, after the PSNI exhumed the body from Strabane Cemetery, Mr Slattery said:"The only way now to identify it is through a process of elimination of the other graves. It's the only way that I see forward to get the result."
However the PSNI later confirmed that DNA tests had shown that the body which was exhumed was not Gerard Slattery's.
The chairman of Strabane District Council, Gerard Foley said that the council could not allow the family to exhume the remains of another six plots without solid evidence that the young man’s body lay in a specific grave.
“We cannot justify digging up six bodies on the off chance that their relative could be one of them or it could turn out to be none of the six.
“Unless one specific grave is pinpointed by the family then we cannot do it,” he said.
DUP Colr.Thomas Kerrigan also raised his concerns saying that there had been such confusion in the past when the family had exhumed a body from the graveyard.
“We are caught in a very serious position...if we disturb another six graves then there is bound to be somebody that comes back to us down the line to say they want to identity their relative in the same way,” he said.
It is believed that the family had been told by a grave digger that the body lay “somewhere in the area” of the six workhouse plots.
It is understood that no formal identification was possible in 1974 and police had hoped that advances in scientific techniques since then would enable a DNA profile to be created.
The full article contains 425 words and appears in Journal Friday DER Edition newspaper.
