A legal challenge brought against the Ministry of Defence (MoD) by the relatives of the victims of a 1994 RAF Chinook helicopter crash will not be allowed to proceed, a High Court judge has ruled.
A Chinook helicopter carrying 25 passengers and four crew crashed in the Mull of Kintyre in Scotland on 2 June 1994, killing all of those on board.
In a ruling, Mr Justice Christopher Butcher refused to allow the claim to proceed and found that it had been brought too late.
The legal team for the Chinook Justice Campaign (CJC) group representing many of the victims’ families said it would now consider taking the case to the European Court of Human Rights.
Andy Burnham, who is expected to soon become prime minister, was also called upon to intervene.
The CJC, which is made up of more than 55 family members of 25 of the victims, had argued the challenge should be allowed to go ahead over concerns about the airworthiness of the aircraft.
Ahead of the hearing, the MoD was defending the legal bid on the grounds that it had been brought too late.
In his ruling, Butcher agreed with this contention.
“It is right to say at the outset that the crash of the Chinook with the loss of 29 lives was a tragedy of a dimension which it is difficult to describe,” he said.
“The pain of bereavement and the agony of loss of the families and friends of those who perished remains, I have no doubt, enduring and bitter.”
He said his task was to “recognise legal tests” to the claim, and said there would have been grounds for challenging the MoD on whether it breached its obligations to adequately investigate the incident from 2011.
This was the year the Mull of Kintyre Review was published, a report which exonerated the pilots involved from blame, but did not give a conclusion on the cause of death.
The incident was first investigated by an internal Board of Inquiry in 1995, which concluded that there was an error on the part of the pilots, Flight Lieutenant Rick Cook and Jonathan Tapper.
The judge said that the CJC could have known that there was a breach of the MoD’s obligations to adequately investigate the incident from the conclusion of the Mull of Kintyre review.
He continued that “cogent grounds” would be needed to justify the claim being allowed to proceed more than 14 years after the review’s conclusion, but said: “No such grounds have been shown.”
