A classic IRA tactic throughout the Troubles has proved to have been repeated and be hampering the police in investigating the brutal beating that killed Cullyhanna man, Paul Quinn.

It has emerged that while the murder took place in the Irish Republic, most suspects in the investigation are in fact from the republican heartland of south Armagh, across the Irish border in Northern Ireland.

PSNI Deputy Chief Constable, Paul Leighton, told the N I Policing Board this week that most people involved in last month's killing of Paul Quinn, 21, were from north of the border.

Mr Quinn was abducted from Cullyhanna, south Armagh, and beaten with bars by up to nine men in a farm outbuilding in County Monaghan.

Mr Leighton said: "Most of the witnesses and suspects and so on would be on this side of the border and, to a large extent, what is on the southern side of the border is a crime scene."

There were many occasions in the past when the IRA either killed or abducted their victims in one jurisdiction, but dumped the body in the other, so hugely complicating the subsequent investigation.

There has been concern that political power-sharing at Stormont between Sinn Fein and Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party could be jeopardised if family claims that the mainstream IRA was behind the killing are proved, with the cross-border tactic adding credibility to the family's insistence that the IRA had indeed killed their son.

(BMcC)