Families of IRA victims have reacted angrily to the European Court of Human Rights judgment awarding £10,000 to the families of IRA activists shot dead by RUC and the British Army.
Mr Brian Goodman, whose son, Special Constable Glenn Goodman, was murdered by an IRA gunman in Tadcaster, Yorkshire in 1992, said: "I'm not at all surprised. I deplore the action. The IRA just get anything and everything they want. The victims get nothing.
"I am very very angry and upset. Nothing has been said about my son who was killed by the IRA in cold blood."
Victims of Crime Trust spokesman Mr Norman Brennan said of the judgment: "I think it is an insult to all the police officers and innocent victims who have lost their lives during the Troubles."
Conservative MP Andrew Hunter, a member of the Northern Ireland Select Committee, called the judgment "obscene".
The Basingstoke MP added: "Those IRA men had no regard whatsoever for the human rights and the `right to life' of their victims. They regarded and treated them as `legitimate targets'. Those men didn't give a damn about any article of any convention.
Meanwhile RUC Chief Constable Sir Ronnie Flanagan said: "It has to be remembered that the European Court, when asked whether four specific articles had been breached, they found in relation to three of those that there had been no breach.
"They found in relation to that article which ensures the right to life that the investigative procedures were not, in their view, sufficiently independent."
The Government faces the threat of hundreds of new compensation claims after judges in Europe ruled that the terrorists' human rights had been violated, basing their decision on a failure to investigate the killings properly.
It was a ruling which left relatives jubilant and outraged unionists who demanded no money be paid.
The families included relatives of eight heavily armed Provisionals ambushed by the SAS as they retreated from a gun and bomb attack which destroyed a police station.
In four separate cases involving a total of 12 deaths the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg found procedural violation of Article 2 of the Human Rights Convention guaranteeing a right to life.
The Government was also ordered to pay costs totalling £105,000.
Relatives immediately demanded the RUC officers and soldiers involved be charged with murder and claimed the verdict had opened the floodgates for a mass of similar actions.
Ms Mairead Kelly, whose brother Patrick was among the eight IRA men killed by the SAS at Loughgall, Co Armagh in l987, said the Government had been indicted in front of the rest of the world.
She said: "This cannot be washed under the carpet. Everybody, and I mean everybody, who was involved in this, including those who initiated and planned it, must be held accountable.
The seven judges, including a British representative, unanimously ruled that the Conventions' right to life Article applies as much to state investigation of deaths as it did to actual killings.
PA