The month-long search of a Dublin back garden for the remains of two babies allegedly strangled and buried there in the 1960s and 1970s has concluded with nothing being found.
Gardaí dug up the back garden of the Walkinstown house after a woman, now in her 50s, alleged that she had been raped by her father and other men at the home when she was a child and teenager in the 1960s and early 1970s.
She told investigators that she gave birth to two babies, when she was aged 12 and 14, who were then killed by her mother and buried in the garden.
The current occupants of the house were not connected in any way to the investigation and were relocated by gardaí while the sensitive and detailed work was carried out at the property.
The investigation involved digging up the soil and taking it away for forensic analysis, as well as lifting a patio and demolishing a shed so that searches could be carried out under them for any possible bones.
But painstaking sifting through the soil and analysis of sonar scans to detect previous disturbance to the ground yielded nothing.
"The search has been concluded and no evidence was found," a garda spokeswoman told the Irish Independent.
A file with all the statements gathered during the course of the investigation is now being prepared for the Director of Public Prosecutions.
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