Digging For IRA 'Secrets'
After years of silence, the IRA is finally revealing the whereabouts of some of its vanished victims, but the goodwill gesture is producing more pain than peace.
A relative of a woman abducted and killed by the IRA called Monday for the guerrillas to give specific details of where she and other "disappeared" victims lie secretly buried.
The plea came as Irish police struggled in vain to locate bodies after intermediaries gave a special commission information from the Irish Republican Army guerrilla group about where they would be found.
"I feel the commission should be approaching the Provisional (IRA) leadership today and demanding that they come back to this site," Belfast resident Seamus McKendry said as a mechanical digger ripped through parking spaces at a beachside parking lot to find the body of his mother-in-law, Jean McConville.
The search for McConville had been extended after teams of police dug to a depth of six feet across six parking spaces near Templetown Beach around 50 miles north of Dublin in the border county of Louth.
CBS News Correspondent Jesse Schulman reports that as police dig, McConville's daughter, Helen, waits. She was orphaned when the IRA killed her widowed mother thinking she was a British sympathizer.
"After 26 years, we're not going to complain about it a day longer, as long as we get it resolved," her son-in-law said.
The first of the "Disappeared" was handed over on Friday, when a brand-new coffin was found in an ancient rural graveyard. As a peace gesture, the IRA has given police the whereabouts of nine of the victims.
But finding them is taking them has taken much longer than expected.
Because these were executions, probably carried out in the middle of the night, the graves were unmarked. And after 25 years, it is easy to forget which hill or tree was nearby.
Difficult terrain hampered police operations at designated spots in wet bogland, marshy moors and the coastal Templetown Beach site.
"Someone (should) come back to this site and pinpoint the spot and end this anguish," said McKendry after he and his wife, Helen, watched the third day of digging for the grave of McConville, a widowed mother of 10 who was killed in 1972.
McKendry, who praised the police operations, said: "I demand that they (the IRA) help me and the other families. The same difficulties are being experienced at other sites around the country at the moment."
The victims were murdered after falling foul of republican hardliners. McKendry has been a relentless campaigner for the families, who want the bodies returned for Christian burial.
McKendry said he and his wife "shook their heads in disbelief" when they arrived at the sand dunes and heard someone had pinpointed the burial spot.
"How could you -- every bit looks the same," he said.
Police said the search would continue, bt conceded that it could take days or even weeks.
A search team was also digging at a 30-yard -by -30-yard site in County Wicklow, south of Dublin, using a mechanical digger to excavate a spot where newspapers reported the body of Danny McIlhone, murdered in 1978 for allegedly stealing IRA weapons, was buried.
One digger at the site, where the search was expected to continue late into the afternoon, said: "It's not looking good."
In addition, police on Monday searched two sites in the northern border county of Monaghan.
A police spokesman said the names of "The Disappeared" would not be officially linked to particular digs until positive identification had been made through clothes, dental records or DNA.
So far the IRA have admitted killing, and located the graves of, only nine "disappeared" people.
But the Irish Times reported on Monday that the commission, set up by the British and Irish governments last Friday to oversee the recovery of the bodies, would press for identification of the burial places of five others.