Nick Clegg has announced that a "respected lawyer" would head up what was described as an independent review into the Chinook helicopter crash on the mull of Kintyre in 1994.

The announcement came in a response to a parliamentary question from James Arbuthnot, chairman of the Commons defence committee. The MoD said a formal announcement would follow in due course.

The crash occurred in June 1994 when the Chinook, carrying 25 senior security and intelligence officers based in Northern Ireland to Inverness, ran into a hillside on the Mull of Kintyre in poor weather. A fatal accident inquiry under Sheriff Sir Stephen Young ruled there was no proof the pilots were to blame. RAF air marshalls claimed pilot negligence was the cause of the event, a claim hotly disputed by the pilot’s families. The UK government have persistently blocked calls for an inquiry into the incident.

"Every inquiry that has been held which has been independent of the Ministry of Defence has found it impossible to attribute negligence to the pilots who died in the crash," Arbuthnot said.

The MoD won $3m in damages from the US manufacturers of the Chinook engine after a software malfunction in 1989 pumped too much fuel into the rotors, causing a near-fatal overspeed. It is reported that the MoD did not tell the accident investigators about this litigation.

The fault code for such an error is “E5“, the same fault code found on one of the crashed Chinook's computers.

"This announcement is very welcome and long overdue. The honour of two brave pilots has been grotesquely impugned by an unjust procedure which was in effect a breach of Queen's regulations," said former shadow home secretary David Davis.