Kingsmill Massacre - The Attack

The Attack

On 5 January 1976 just after 5.30 pm, a red Ford Transit minibus was carrying sixteen textile workers home from work in Glenanne to Bessbrook. Five were Catholics and eleven were Protestants. Four of the Catholics got out at Whitecross, while the rest continued on the road to Bessbrook. As the bus cleared the rise of a hill, it was stopped by a man in British Army uniform standing on the road and flashing a torch. The workers assumed they were being stopped and searched by the British Army. As the bus stopped, eleven masked gunmen with blackened faces and wearing combat jackets emerged from the hedges. A man "with a pronounced English accent" then began talking. He ordered them to line-up beside the bus and then asked "Who is the Catholic?". The only Catholic was Richard Hughes. His workmates—now fearing that the gunmen were loyalists who had come to kill him—tried to stop him from identifying himself. However, when Hughes stepped forward the gunman told him to "Get down the road and don't look back". The lead gunman then said "Right" and the other armed men immediately opened fire on the workers.

The remaining eleven men were shot at very close range with AR-18 and L1A1 SLR rifles, a 9mm pistol, and an M1 carbine. A total of 136 rounds were fired in less than a minute. The dead and wounded men's bodies fell on top of each other. When the shooting stopped, one of the gunmen walked amongst the dying men and shot each of them in the head as they lay on the ground. Ten of them died at the scene but one, Alan Black, survived despite having eighteen gunshot wounds.

Hughes managed to stop a car and was driven to Bessbrook RUC station, where he raised the alarm. Meanwhile, a man and his wife had come upon the scene of the killings and had begun praying beside the victims. They found Alan Black, who was lying in a ditch and badly wounded. When an ambulance arrived, Black was taken to hospital in Newry, where he was operated on and survived. A police officer said that the road was "an indescribable scene of carnage", whilst Johnston Chapman, the uncle of victims Reginald and Walter Chapman, said that the dead men were "just lying there like dogs, blood everywhere". At least two of the victims were so badly mutilated by gunfire that immediate relatives were prevented from identifying them. One relative stated that the hospital mortuary "was like a butcher's shop with bodies lying on the floor like slabs of meat".

Nine of the dead, the textile workers, were from the village of Bessbrook, while the bus driver, Robert Walker (46), was from nearby Mountnorris. Four of the men were members of the Orange Order.