Paratrooper Lee Clegg, convicted of murdering a teenage girl in west Belfast in 1990, has been granted a retrial. The Northern Ireland Court of Appeal declared yesterday that Clegg's conviction was unsafe because it was based on suppositions now shown to be unfounded.
Paratrooper Clegg, a 30-year-old lance-corporal in the Parachute Regiment, was not in court to hear the verdict. It was welcomed by his legal adviser, Mr Simon McKay, who said: "A retrial is exactly what we expected in law. It is all that Lee Clegg has ever wanted. We look forward to presenting all our evidence at the trial in due course."
Clegg has been free on licence since July 1995, two years after he was sentenced to life imprisonment for murdering Ms Karen Reilly (18), from Twinbrook, west Belfast.
She was a passenger in a stolen car which was struck by 19 bullets fired by paratroopers as it sped away from a road-block on the Glen Road, west Belfast. The driver, Martin Peake (17), was also killed.
It was Clegg's third appeal against his conviction. He lost previous applications in the Northern Ireland Appeal Court and the House of Lords.
His case was referred back to the court by a former Northern Ireland secretary, Sir Patrick Mayhew, now Lord Mayhew, after he was presented with a dossier of ballistics evidence.
It related to the shot which killed Karen Reilly. Defence counsel argued that the fatal shot went through the side of the car when the vehicle was a danger to other members of the patrol, and not through the rear when it was no longer a threat.