THE two-week review of Northern Ireland’s most controversial unsolved sectarian killings concluded yesterday.

Delivering his report, the judge addressed the widow of a Catholic police officer — father-of-eight Sergeant Joseph Campbell — who was shot dead as he closed a police station in 1977.

“You have had a long wait and I hope we can do something to move this on because it has gone on a long time — too long.”

Northern Ireland’s chief judge Lord Chief Justice Sir Declan Morgan had asked Lord Justice Weir to assess more than 50 stalled cases, relating to almost 100 deaths.

His job was to find out why they are still stuck in the coroners’ system — some almost 45 years later — and identifying a sequence for hearing them.

They include allegations of security force misinformation to frame the IRA for bombings, state collusion in loyalist murders, inept police investigations and IRA men shot dead by the army as part of an alleged shoot-to-kill policy in which civilians were killed in the cross-fire.

The Police Service of Northern Ireland has claimed that insufficient resources were to blame for the delay in investigating the cases.

But on Thursday Mr Weir dismissed similar excuses from the armed forces for missing deadlines for disclosing classified papers to coroners’ courts.

“The MoD is not short of money,” he said. “It’s busy all over the world fighting wars and it’s about to buy some new submarines with nuclear warheads — so it’s not short of money.”

Belfast Unemployed Resource Centre chairman Joe Bowers said: “There are allegations supported by growing evidence the state was involved in these deaths as a deliberate policy.”

The latest allegation is that the IRA commander who planned the 1993 Shankill Road fishmongers’ bombing — in which loyalist paramilitaries as well as bystanders were killed — was a British security forces agent.

“There is an understandable demand by people on the Shankill Road and their representatives for clarification as to whether the agent’s handlers were aware the bombing was going to take place and could they have taken action to prevent it,” Mr Bowers said.