Michael O’Dwyer

Michael O’Dwyer 24 years, Falls Road, west Belfast, shot dead by a RUC member at a Sinn Fein office on the Falls Road, on 4 February 1992. Two other men, Paddy Loughran (61) and Patrick McBride (40), were also killed. Two other people were injured. 

The RUC member responsible, Constable Alan Moore, entered the office in plain clothes armed with a pump-action shotgun, which he hid inside a bag. He apparently intended killing leading members of Sinn Fein but after a short time in a waiting room opened fire. 

Mr O’Dwyer was in the waiting room with his young child when he was shot at point blank range. Moore escaped in his own car, which was parked out side the office. He then drove some twenty miles to Ballinderry, on the shores of Lough Neagh, where he reportedly shot himself with the same shotgun. Before his death he made two phone calls to RUC officers at Musgrave and Newtownabbey barracks. 

At an inquest into Moore’s death in 1993 it was revealed that bomb-making material found at his home was similar to that sent to a number of nationalists in County Antrim in 1991. These bomb attacks were claimed at the time by the UFF. 

Mr O’Dwyer’s mother, Sarah, was killed in a no-warning UVF bomb attack on a bar in the New Lodge Road area of Belfast in January 1976.