The Watford widow of a man killed in a helicopter crash has vowed to "carry on fighting" as a former Defence Secretary backed calls for an inquiry.
John Tobias was one of 29 intelligence experts and special forces crew killed when the helicopter crashed on the Mull of Kintyre, en route from RAF Aldergrove in Northern Ireland to Fort George near Inverness, on June 2, 1994.
The incident was initially blamed on pilot error before this was overturned in 2011 - but wife Gaynor and sons Andy and Matt, all from Watford, have spent three decades campaigning for justice.
Sir Liam Fox - who served as Defence Secretary between 2010 and 2011 - has this week called on Sir Keir Starmer to launch an inquiry into the cause of the crash, claiming that new evidence suggests the Ministry of Defence and RAF may have misled two previous inquiries.
On Tuesday (June 2) he was joined by families of victims to deliver a letter to 10 Downing Street on the tragedy's 32nd anniversary.
Speaking to reporters just after he had handed in the letter, Sir Liam said: “We want there to be an overview of the whole of tragedy, not just the immediate cause of the crash, which was looked into, or the pilots’ responsibility, and they obviously were cleared.
“But what was the sequence of events that led up to this? We want Sir Keir to set up a mechanism of looking into the whole issue with people who will be qualified to look at all the data."
Gaynor Tobias told the Press Association: "It would be tremendous to put this to bed. We don’t feel we can move on with all this dishonesty and deceit. We would like the government to not be so intransigent, to work with us.
“Perhaps an apology would be nice and we would like to know this won’t happen to any other family again. We’ll carry on fighting. We’re a strong group."
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The 75-year-old added: “We had a meeting with three ministers in December, who said that they would enter into dialogue with us. Unfortunately, when it came to March we hadn’t heard anything from them. It made us a little bit disappointed because we didn’t really feel that they had listened to us.”
Her son Andy claimed that campaigners have "huge amounts" of evidence and said he hopes the Prime Minister will listen and provide them with "an opportunity to get to the truth and justice for my father".
A 2024 BBC documentary revealed that the files related to the tragedy had been sealed by the MoD for 100 years.
