Search team looking for Ruddy, who was abducted and killed by INLA in 1985, announces discovery at Pont-de-l’Arche

A search team examining a French forest for the body of the “disappeared” republican murder victim Seamus Ruddy has found human remains.

The remains were discovered in a forest near Rouen in the searches linked to the high-profile disappearance of the Newry-born teacher.

Ruddy was living in Paris in 1985 when he was abducted, tortured, shot dead and later buried in secret.

The independent commission for the location of victims’ remains, which was set up to find the “disappeared” from the Northern Ireland Troubles, has been digging in the forest since early this week. They confirmed on Saturday morning that fresh remains had been found.

The “disappeared” include more than a dozen people who were kidnapped, killed and secretly buried by the IRA during the conflict. Ruddy was the only victim of the INLA, a republican breakaway faction.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Seamus Ruddy. Photograph: Picture library

His sister Ann Morgan, who has run a long campaign to have her brother’s secret burial place located, went to the search site in the forest at Pont-de-l’Arche in northern France on Friday. It is understood she has been informed about the discovery of the remains, which are now being forensically examined.

The Irish Republican Socialist party, the INLA’s political wing to which Ruddy once belonged, said on Saturday it believed the remains were those of the missing teacher.

Ruddy was the victim of factional fighting within the INLA, a leftwing republican group which broke away from the official IRA in protest at the latter organisation’s ceasefire in 1972.

The INLA was split in the mid-1980s by the development of two rival factions, one of which controlled an arms-smuggling network that began with the Palestine Liberation Organisation in Tunis, and was routed through communist Czechoslovakia and France before arriving in Ireland.

A rival gang within the INLA wanted to seize control of that network and sent a number of its activists to France on a mission to unearth caches of weapons that had been hidden before being shipped to Ireland.

This faction believed Ruddy was aware of the location of the arms dumps in France and kidnapped him after meeting him at a bar in the Montparnasse district of Paris in May 1985.

By this time Ruddy, who had previously been involved in procuring arms for the INLA, told the group that he had severed his links with the movement.

They did not believe him and after holding a second meeting in a Parisian apartment owned by a Derry man, abducted Ruddy, tortured him and shot him dead when he failed to give details about the arms dumps.

Ruddy was a popular figure within Irish republican circles and two years later allies exacted revenge on those they believed were responsible for his death and disappearance. They shot dead the INLA member John O’Reilly and his close friend Thomas “Ta” Power at a hotel near Drogheda. The counter-strike led to a bloody internal INLA fight which left 13 men dead and effectively tore the organisation apart.

There have since been a series of secret talks between the two former factions to try to find where Ruddy was buried. The ICLVR has carried out three previous searches in France, the most recent one in 2008.

Ruddy is one of four of the “disappeared” still missing, presumed dead. The others include Capt Robert Nairac, an SAS officer who was killed and buried by the IRA after being abducted while operating undercover inside a South Armagh pub in 1977. The other two missing men are Columba McVeigh, and the former monk and ex-IRA member Joe Lynskey.