Boy's body to be exhumed in child abuse probe
Detectives investigating alleged child abuse at a reform school during the 1960s and 1970s were today exhuming the body of a 13-year-old boy.
Police suspect the boy, who died in 1970 and was buried in Kilkenny, could have been assaulted while attending the Christian Brothers’ Letterfrack Reformatory School in Connemara, Co Galway.
Allegations of physical and sexual abuse at the school first surfaced in 1996, when a man complained to gardai in Dublin he had been assaulted as a pupil.
An incident room was set up at Clifden Garda station and a team of nine officers assembled under Superintendent Tony Dowd.
A police spokesman described today’s exhumation as part of a ‘‘long-running investigation’’ and said a post-mortem examination is to be carried out on the exhumed boy’s remains.
Letterfrack, which accepted boys between the ages of six and 16 who had lost their parents, came from broken homes or were deemed to be young offenders, was closed in the mid-1970s.
