The Forgotten Massacre: Annie's Bar Top of the Hill

On Wednesday, December 20, 1972, five men were murdered at Annie's Bar Top of the Hill as they watched the midweek football.

On Derry Now today, in the week of the 50th anniversary of their deaths we remember them.

1972 in the city was bookended by two atrocities which left 19 Derry men dead.

On Bloody Sunday, January 30, British army paratroopers murdered 13 anti-internment protesters in the Bogside. A fourteenth died four months later from the injuries he sustained on the day.

On December 20, Charlie McCafferty (31), Frank McCarron (58), Barney Kelly (26), Michael McGinley (37) and Charles Moore (31) were gunned down in the Annie’s Bar Top of the Hill Massacre, in Derry’s Waterside, while watching a football match on television.

Derry Coroner Major Hubert O’Neill described the slaying of the five men as “nothing short of a horrible, sadistic, brutal murder”.

He added: “Here we had people innocently going into a bar to have a drink and watch a football match on television, when some monsters in human form came in and mowed them down with a machine gun and a pistol.”

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The coroner recorded open verdicts at the inquest of the murdered men, the only verdict possible in the North of Ireland at the time when a death had not been through the criminal courts process.

The RUC investigation of the murders established that about 20 shots were fired during the attack, 15 from a machine gun and five from a pistol or a revolver.

The car used by the killers was a yellow coloured Ford Zephyr, which was stolen from a car park at Clooney Terrace. It was found a short time after the attack blazing at Trench Road.

According to the Historical Enquiry Team (HET) report into the murder of Michael McGinley, five of the six people arrested for the murders were suspected of being members of the UDA.

Two juveniles were charged with the theft of the Ford Zephyr car. The charges were later withdrawn on the directions of the director of public prosecutions because witnesses withdrew their evidence. One of the juveniles charged with the theft was one of the five people initially arrested for the murders.

No-one has ever been charged with the Annie’s Bar Top of the Hill murders.

The view of the HET was that those murdered in the Annie’s Bar Massacre were “innocent victims of sectarian murder carried out by the UDA”.

The HET was a unit of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) set up in September 2005 to investigate the 3,269 unsolved murders committed during the Troubles, specifically between 1968 and 1998. It was wound up in September 2014, when the PSNI restructured following budget cuts.

In a requested statement to Derry News, the PSNI said: “The Historical Enquiries Team (HET) completed a review into the murders at the Top of The Hill Bar on the Strabane Old Road in Derry on December 20, 1972 and no new investigative opportunities were identified as a result of that review.

“While the case does not form part of the current caseload of Legacy Investigation Branch, any new information about these murders should be brought to the attention of police and, where credible investigative lines of inquiry are identified, capable of leading to the identification and prosecution of suspects, will be considered.”