Man who dug bodies out of rubble of Shankill bomb says that IRA chants at Feile trigger smell of blood and burnt flesh

Jim Verner, who unknowingly carried IRA bomber Sean Kelly to safety, said he wished he had “strung him up from the nearest lamppost” for the murder of nine innocent people in Frizzell’s fish shop on October 23, 1993.

Mr Verner, in a tearful interview with Stephen Nolan, said the West Belfast Festival is a trigger for his PTSD.

He told the Nolan Show on BBC Radio Ulster: “They talk about the future and put the past behind us.

“How can we put the past behind us when they glorify their past in front of everyone?"

He added: “The PTSD, you try to lock this in your head, but these things keep coming out all the time.

“Every year I hear and see [the Feile festival] that starts it off – the traumatisation of the bomb and right through to after it.

"I live miles away, I don't live on the Shankill no more, but how must the people of that part of west Belfast, the Shankill, feel when they hear ‘ooh ah up the ‘ra’ when they know the trouble and the bombs that they done – especially the Shankill bomb with the nine innocent people?”

To the people who say it's just a song he said: "Maybe they should see the likes of the children being carried out of bombs"

Mr Verner, who was at his mother-in-law’s house on the Shankill Road when the bomb went off, recalled: "I ran straight out and down the street, I was one of the first ones there.

"I ran straight up onto the rubble. There were still bits of masonry falling, and the dust cloud, I'd run through it.

"The one thing that never leaves you from this [is] the heat from the explosion, the smell of blood and burnt flesh. I'll take it to the grave with me.

"My first instinct was to help save people. Somebody shouted there might be another bomb, but myself and others we stayed.

"I immediately came back down from the rubble because there was a guy lying at the front of the rubble and I says to [another] guy, ‘give us a hand and we'll carry this guy to safety’.

"His leg was badly up his back, twisted. His eye was out on his cheek.

"What haunts me more, not his injuries, is that I'd carried the man who just murdered nine innocent people."

That man was Sean Kelly, who along with Thomas Begley had carried out the bombing. Begley died when the bomb went off and the Provisional IRA later claimed they were targeting a meeting of UDA leaders in a room above the shop.

Kelly was sent to jail for life on nine counts of murder, but released under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement in 2000.

Mr Verner said: “I wish I'd strung him up from the nearest lamppost. Any man who would have known who Sean Kelly was that day would do the same.”

He added: "[The bomb] just didn't kill nine innocent people – it killed an entire community.”