Campaigners seeking an inquiry into the killing of 24 male villagers in Malaya in 1948 by British troops have lost their fight at London’s High Court. Judges upheld a government decision not to hold a public hearing into the alleged massacre in the former colony. They said it would be “very difficult” to establish now whether the actions of the Scots Guards had been “deliberate”. Relatives of the victims plan to appeal, and said evidence in the case proved those shot were not insurgents, BBC reported. The killings occurred at Batang Kali in the Malayan state of Selangor in December 1948, at a time when the country was part of the British Empire. Chong Koon Ying’s father was killed at Batang Kali in 1948 At the time the British government said the villagers had been suspected insurgents killed trying to escape. A later claim that the killings were premeditated was subject to a police investigation in the 1960s, but this was dropped because of a lack of “sufficient evidence”.