Three Scottish Soldiers: Rutherglen man sees "light at end of the tunnel" in search for justice over

A Rutherglen man who has campaigned tirelessly to find out the truth behind his cousin’s murder in an IRA honeytrap believes there is now “light at the end of the tunnel”.  Dougald McCaughey, from Castlemilk, was just 23 when he was killed, along with fellow soldiers, brothers John and Joseph McCaig, on March 10, 1971.  The trio were the first off-duty soldiers to be killed by the IRA in the Troubles, and their deaths sparked mass protests.  No-one has ever been convicted of the murders.  Now, campaign group Three Scottish Soldiers has submitted a request to the Attorney General of Northern Ireland, John Larkin, seeking a fresh inquest after uncovering new evidence.  Last week, the group also wrote to First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, requesting a meeting to discuss their findings, which came after they were given access to previously unseen police files.  The three Royal Highland Fusiliers were on a pub crawl when they met two women in a small Belfast bar.  They were lured to a remote road and then shot dead.  Among the new discoveries is information that the IRA may have been planning the murders for days, that one of the possible killers could be a former British soldier, and that one of the women involved in the honeytrap could be alive and living in England.  Dougald’s cousin, David McCaughey, says he is optimistic that the families of those killed may soon be able to achieve a sense of closure.   He told the Reformer : “There is light at the end of the tunnel.  “Some of the stuff that has been uncovered, that we did not know before, has been mind-blowing.  “The Attorney General can request an inquest, and that’s what we want – to see the truth come out.  “If they had simply stepped on a landmine I don’t know if I would be doing this now.  “But they were off-duty and looking to have a drink. They had barely been in Ireland and what happened to them was horrific.  “What has always been said to me was not to ‘let these boys be forgotten’, and that is what we have tried to do.  “I cannot praise Kris [McGurk, of the Three Scottish Soldiers] enough for the amount of work he has put in, or the legal team who have been working on this.”  David added that some of the new information has been hard to hear.  “My stomach turned when I heard it could have been an ex-soldier involved in it.  “It feels like everything has been going at 100 miles an hour.”  The new information claims that the Metropolitan Police received intelligence that the IRA was plotting to murder off-duty soldiers.  The dossier names two of the alleged plotters as local IRA members Patrick McAdorey (then 25) and Anthony ‘Dutch’ Doherty (then 20).  Both were already wanted for the murders of two RUC officers.  Doherty was later arrested in connection with the killings, and allegedly named McAdorey, former British soldier Patrick O’Kane and a person known only as Suspect Two as his accomplices.  However, he escaped from prison in November 1971.  A former member of the Parachute Regi