DUNBLANE.. 30 YEARS ON ATROCITY LED TO FAR-REACHING CRACKDOWN

A JFK moment never forgotten

- BY MARK McGIVERN

A KENNEDY moment is an event like the death of US president John F Kennedy that is shared by a nation and causes such shock that it can never be forgotten.

For me, now a 56-year-old veteran journalist, it came on March 13, 1996. The day of the Dunblane atrocity.

The moment frozen in my own consciousness involved a call to my office at a news agency in Birmingham, where I was a fresh-faced novice reporter.

I'd been at a court case and rang in to update the newsdesk. "Something terrible" had happened in Scotland, at a town "somewhere near Stirling".

The full, unimaginable details would soon follow, as would photos from the classroom and elsewhere, revealing the innocents whose deaths would ravage the lives of people living in Dunblane and beyond.

The story would fill 20 pages in the next day's newspapers.