UDR Call Out

The 3rd and the 11th Battalions of The Ulster Defence Regiment were placed on selective call out for four days when ten textile workers travelling in a minibus were shot and murdered near the County Armagh town of Kingsmills.

A group of Provisional IRA gunmen flagged down the vehicle and, when it was halted, ordered out and then questioned the twelve men on board to determine their religious denomination. After one man, a Roman Catholic, was identified and ordered to walk away, the gunmen opened fire killing ten of his eleven fellow textile workers. The eleventh worker survived despite 18 gunshot wounds. The killings at Kingsmills was the final of a series of tit-for-tat sectarian murders in 1975/76 during what was a ceasefire period declared by the Provisional IRA.