Today is the anniversary of the IRA murder of the lawyer, academic and politician Edgar Graham

Mr Graham, aged 29, was killed by terrorists at the edge of Queen’s University as he was talking to a fellow lecturer Dermot Nesbitt as they were between lectures on December 7 1983.

Republican gunmen ran up and shot Mr Graham in the head at close range.

He was aged only 29 but was already an Ulster Unionist member of the Stormont assembly and was talked of as a future leader of the party and indeed of unionism.

The law lecturer is believed to have been set up for murder by personnel within the university but no-one has ever been convicted of the crime.

Young republican sympathisers in the students’ union are reported to have cheered the announcement of his shooting.

Mr Graham had argued politically and legally in favour of controversial supergrass trials against paramilitaries, including in a heated debate at Queen’s shortly before his murder.

The IRA said that his killing “should be a salutary lesson to those loyalists who stand foursquare behind the laws and forces of oppression of the nationalist people”.

The contrast between the legal treatment of Mr Graham’s murder and that of the lawyer Pat Finucane, murdered by loyalists at home in 1989, has been much cited in recent weeks amid the push for millions of pounds more to be spent on a public inquiry into Mr Finucane’s shooting, on top of millions spent in three previous investigations into that murder.

Mr Graham’s parents are now dead but were alive when the family got a first letter from the Historic Enquiries Team (HET), the body that was set up to investigate unsolved Troubles killings.

Anne Graham, Edgar’s sister, who survives him, was later advised that the amount of information on file that the investigation would take three years. She was given a second team of HET officers.

Finally, in 2014, HET told Ms Graham that they had completed their investigation and it had not yielded any new evidence or investigative opportunities.

No report would be produced.

Yesterday Ms Graham tweeted out four pictures of her brother without comment, including one of him dressed as a barrister, as reproduced above, and one of the aftermath of his shooting.

Sinn Fein politicians including Michelle O’Neill, the one-time candidate and lecturer Peter Doran, and the Northern Belfast MP John Finucane have been asked if they condemn Mr Graham’s murder.

While they say that they regret all such killings, no major figure within the party has explicitly condemned it as a murder by the IRA which should not have happened.

In 2013 and in 2018, on the 30th and 35th anniversary of the attack, people including students and former colleagues of Mr Graham gathered at Queen’s to pay tribute to him.

Anne Graham has also helped to organise an annual Edgar Graham Memorial speaking competition of school pupils.

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