Main pic: Stephen McKinney leaving Dungannon Courthouse last year. (NW Newspix).
A Strabane man who murdered his wife during a boating holiday in County Fermanagh has lost an appeal against his conviction.
Stephen McKinney, who lived for a time in Convoy, was jailed for a minimum of 20 years for murdering 35-year-old Lu Na McKinney in April 2017. Her body was recovered from Lough Erne near a jetty at Devenish Island, where the couple were moored on a hire cruiser with their two young children.
The late Lu Na McKinney
McKinney (47) was seeking to overturn his conviction and challenge the sentence.
He claimed his wife fell into the water while on deck to check mooring ropes and that he tried to save her.
But in 2021, a jury at Dungannon Crown Court found him guilty of his wife’s murder after accepting the prosecution case that it was not a boating accident.
At the Court of Appeal in June, McKinney’s lawyers advanced a number of grounds in his attempt to have the verdict declared unsafe.
BBC News NI reports today that three appeal court judges rejected all seven grounds of appeal that the conviction was unsafe.
Read the full report on www.bbc.com