Senior police officers decided not to pursue Martin McGuinness over his alleged role in an IRA attack which killed nine people, it has been claimed.

It has now emerged, following the death of Mr McGuinness at the age of 66 on Monday night, that police officers were allegedly told to drop the investigation against the senior Sinn Fein leader and former IRA chief of staff over the 1972 Claudy bombing - because any prosecution would have been too “politically sensitive.”

Sources have told The Daily Telegraph that detectives with the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) believed by around 2007 that they had accumulated enough evidence against Mr McGuinness to question him over his role in what became known as ‘Bloody Monday’, when three-car bombs were set off in the town in one of the worst outrages of ‘the Troubles’.