4,000 pages of material on Jim Donegan murder to be handed over to inquest

More than 4,000 pages of material relating to the murder of a man who was shot outside a school in Belfast is to be provided by the Police Ombudsman to the inquest into his death.

Jim Donegan was shot dead by a lone gunman while waiting to collect his son on the Glen Road in west Belfast on December 4 2018.

A pre-inquest review hearing at Laganside Courthouse on Wednesday heard that the proceedings are still at the early stage of obtaining material.

Coroner Joe McCrisken said since the last hearing the office of the Police Ombudsman had disclosed to the coroner’s service a number of schedules of material.

He said: “The underlying materials themselves seem to run to just over 4,000 pages, so a substantial amount of material to be looked over.”

He told the brief hearing that the next stage of the coronial process was to have the material disclosed to the coroner.

He asked that the material be disclosed ahead of the next hearing on November 13.

A report from Northern Ireland’s Police Ombudsman Marie Anderson earlier this year found that the PSNI missed opportunities to identify a dissident republican threat six months before Mr Donegan was murdered.

Ms Anderson said police had received intelligence that dissident republicans were planning to shoot an unnamed man “they believed to be involved in the sale of illegal drugs”.

Mrs Anderson said a failure by police to link Mr Donegan to the threat and warn him about it had “deprived him of the opportunity of taking preventative measures”.