A roadside service at the spot where 10 workmen were murdered by the IRA in Co Armagh 50 years ago is to take place on Monday.
Organisers said the event would be a “poignant” commemoration on the “milestone” anniversary of the Kingsmill massacre, one of the worst atrocities of the Troubles.
The Protestant men were shot dead on their way home from work after their minibus was stopped by armed men posing as British soldiers on the Kingsmill Road in south Armagh on January 5th, 1976.
They asked each of the factory workers on board their religion.
The sole Catholic passenger was told to leave and the remaining 11 men were shot multiple times. Only one man, Alan Black, survived, despite being shot 18 times. No one has been convicted of the murders.
Many relatives of those murdered at Kingsmill have since died and a victims’ group has called for justice for those who “went to their graves without ever seeing accountability”.
“A lot of the first-generation Kingsmill victims, as with many other atrocities, have sadly passed away. Certainly parents, widows and widowers are mainly gone,” Kenny Donaldson, of the South East Fermanagh Foundation, said.
“For 50 years they have been denied justice, truth and accountability for a crime which was among the most depraved of the terror campaign.
“This milestone year does put an additional layer of pressure on families. Their pain will be as raw now as it was at the time.
“There isn’t a peace within people.”
A separate religious service remembering those killed is to take place at Bessbrook Town Hall on Sunday.
“Our thoughts are also with the Reaveys, O’Dowds and all other innocents marking 50th anniversaries at this time – all of these acts of terror were unjustified and unjustifiable,” Mr Donaldson said.
The victims’ campaigner paid tribute to the “immense dignity” of bereaved families and to Alan Black who “daily carries physical injury and psychological horrors”.
“They have not uttered words of vengeance or sentiments of wanting retaliation,” he said.
In 2024, a coroner described the Kingsmill murders as an “overtly sectarian attack by the IRA”, but did not name those individuals suspected of involvement.
The massacre was “a stain not only on the UK and Irish governments but moreover the local community of south Armagh”, Mr Donaldson said.
“There are those who remain within our midst [in the community] who have not been held accountable for their crimes against humanity,” he said.
Failings in the original police investigation into the atrocity were revealed in a scathing watchdog report published last year.
Eleven suspects were not arrested while crucial investigative opportunities in ballistics, forensics, fingerprints and palm prints were missed, the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland found.
The watchdog report was carried out in response to complaints made by relatives and by Mr Black.