Kingsmills Massacre anniversary: Sole survivor of IRA atrocity Alan Black explains why he can no longer face annual memorial service

On 5 January 1976, the IRA gunned down 10 Protestant textile workers on a lonely road in south Armagh in what the Historical Enquiries Team described as an act of "sectarian savagery".

Tomorrow at 10:45am a memorial service for the men, organised by victims group FAIR, will take place at the memorial wall built in their memory at the site of the atrocity, near the village of Kingsmills.

Despite being shot 18 times, Alan Black, then aged 32, was the sole survivor of the shooting.

"I don't go anymore," he said of the memorial service.

"It is just too much. It might be an age thing, I don't know. I just can't face it."

However he said his thoughts would "certainly" be with his former work colleagues on the anniversary.

On Wednesday this week he had a long conversation with a relative of one of those who was murdered.

"It is just a bad time of the year for all of us."

It has been some years since he last attended a memorial service.

"I can't remember the last time. I know that it nearly killed me. It has been a long time. Normally on the anniversary I keep myself to myself.

"I don't want to face people. So I just stay in the house."

He is not impressed with the ongoing legacy inquest into the massacre.

"It is not an inquest at all. What was supposed to take five weeks is now six and a half years.

"And every bit of information that we get, we have to drag it out of them."

He has been involved in a legal action - still not formally concluded - to force the inquest to name a key suspect, now deceased.

The coroner has argued that naming suspects could put their lives in danger.

The 10 men killed were John Bryans, Robert Chambers, Reginald Chapman, Walter Chapman, Robert Freeburn, Joseph Lemmon, John McConville, James McWhirter, Robert Samuel Walker and Kenneth Worton.

The minibus was bringing the men home when it was waved down by what appeared to be an army patrol.

They lined the men up against the minibus and asked if there were any Catholics among them.

The workers quietly told their sole Catholic colleague to stay quiet - thinking he was going to be abused.

But the gunmen knew who he was and pulled him out of the line before chasing him down the road.

They then opened fire on the bewildered and terrified workmen.

Eleven weapons were used to fire around 160 rounds at the men.

After the first burst of fire, as the men lay in agony on the ground, the lead gunman shouted to finish them off. The gang then emptied dozens more rounds into the injured men as they lay dying on the ground.

The HET said intelligence had named 11 individuals for the attack - and also detailed the terrorist convictions of six of them. The weapons were also used in 39 other IRA murders and 22 attempted murders in south Down and south Armagh.

The day before the attack the UVF gunned down three brothers from the Reavey family in the village of Whitecross.

However, HET said in its Kingsmills report in 2011 that the attack was clearly planned “some time before” and that the UVF murders were “simply the catalyst for the pre-meditated and calculated slaughter” of the 10 men at Kingsmills.

It branded the Kingsmills murders as “sectarian savagery”.