Thousands of pages are to be delivered to a coroner presiding over an inquest into the murder of Jim Donegan, shot dead on a west Belfast street.
The Police Ombudsman, which investigated some of the circumstances ahead of publishing a report in April, has documents totalling 4.000 pages, it emerged at a a pre-inquest review hearing on Wednesday.
Mr Donegan (43) was shot dead by a lone gunman as he waited to collect his 13-year-old son from school on the Glen Road in December 2018. Dissident republicans were blamed.
No-one has been charged while it has been the subject of different legal proceedings, along with the ombudsman investigation.
Legal representatives of Mr Donegan’s family, the PONI and the PSNI attended the short review hearing at Laganside courts.
Once the coroner receives all the documents, they will be assessed for relevance and possible redactions. The hearing was adjourned for eight weeks.
The ombudsman investigation centred largely on intelligence available to the PSNI prior to the murder and how it was handled.
Police missed opportunities to identify the subject of a dissident republican threat, six months before the murder, it was reported in April.
The intelligence, received in June, stated that dissident republicans were planning to shoot an unnamed man “they believed to be involved in the sale of illegal drugs”.
A type of car driven by the target, a Porsche, was identified and it was stated he regularly picked up his son from a school on the Glen Road.
Mr Donegan’s family argued had he been made aware of the threat he would have changed his routine so as not to put his son at risk, a position Ms Anderson largely agreed with. The ombudsman’s recommendation of additional training for intelligence officers was accepted by police.
While Mr Donegan did own and drive a Porsche at the time of the threat, it was registered to his wife. It was among a number of vehicles identified as potentially matching the details contained in the threat.
A police intelligence officer accessed details of all these vehicles and their registered owners, including Mr Donegan’s wife.
