In 1999 the IRA informed the Commission for the Location of Victims' Remains where it believed nine people it had killed, including Jean McConville, were secretly buried.
It raised great hopes that all would be exhumed for proper burial but such was the inexactness of the information that only three bodies were recovered: those of John McClory and Brian McKinney, who disappeared from west Belfast in 1978, found in a bog in Monaghan in 1999, and Eamon Molloy, from north Belfast, whose body the IRA left in a coffin in a graveyard near Dundalk the same year.
Those understood to be on the IRA list who were never found were: Seamus Wright and Kevin McKee, from west Belfast, who disappeared in 1972; Columba McVeigh, from Co Tyrone, last seen in 1975; Brendan Megraw, from west Belfast, missing since 1978; and Danny McIlhone, killed in the late 1970s or very early 1980s.
Mr Seamus McKendry, of the now wound up Families of the Disappeared, believes there are at least six other missing people murdered by paramilitaries.
They include: Charlie Armstrong, who went missing near Crossmaglen in south Armagh in 1981; Gerald Evans, from Crossmaglen, last seen alive near Castleblayney, Co Monaghan, in 1979 - paramilitaries are believed responsible in both cases, although the IRA has never admitted killing them; Capt Robert Nairac of the Grenadier Guards, abducted and killed by the IRA in 1977; and Seamus Ruddy, a former member of the Irish Republican Socialist Party, believed killed in France by its paramilitary wing, the INLA, in 1985.
The IRA has also been accused of murdering Gareth O'Connor, from Armagh City, who went missing earlier this year.
