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Shergar with the Aga Khan after winning the 1981 Irish Derby at the Curragh. Photo: Allsport

Dark reality is of a beautiful animal being gunned to death by incompetent criminals

So much is crammed into the Shergar legend that the all but certain reality of this beautiful, blameless creature dying a horrible death has become almost a footnote.

The precise nature of how Shergar was killed has never been definitively established, the same as how much of what happened to the record-breaking Derby winner in the days after his kidnap from the Aga Khan’s Ballymany Stud outside Newbridge on February 8th, 1983, remains unclear.

SHERGAR’S trainer Michael Stoute has told how the famous steed was “the kindest horse” he worked with.

The Irish-bred thoroughbred was stolen from Ballymany Stud in Co Kildare in 1983 for a ransom of £2million, which was never paid.

The winner of the Epsom and Irish Derbys in 1981 — who was owned by the Aga Khan — is believed to have been shot by his IRA kidnappers after injuring his leg, though the organisation has never officially accepted responsibility.