TWO men who murdered a millionaire and his family are among more than 1,000 criminals bringing a human rights legal challenge over the ban on prisoners voting.

Kenneth Regan and William Horncy will never be released from prison after killing business tycoon Amarjit Chohan, 45, wife Nancy, 25, and their two young sons, 18-month-old Devinder and Ravinder, aged two months, as well as Mrs Chohan’s mother Charanjit Kaur, 51.

Career criminal Regan, of Wilton, near Salisbury, Wiltshire, wanted to take over Mr Chohan’s freight company and use it as a front for drug running.

He and accomplice Horncy, of Adeline Road in Bournemouth, decided to kill the rest of the victim’s family so they would not be found out.

The body of Mr Chohan, of Heston, West London, was found floating in the sea near Bournemouth Pier in April 2003 and his wife’s was recovered in the same area in July.

Mrs Kaur’s body was found in November 2003 in a bay off the Isle of Wight.

The bodies of the two boys have yet to be found.

Now both of the men behind the vicious murders are two of 1,014 prisoners who have completed the first stages in the legal process at Strasbourg which will allow them to vote. The British government has been ordered by the European Court of Human Rights to give a formal response to each case.

More than half of the claims were brought by a single law firm, London-based Leigh Day.

The lead applicant is James Stevens McHugh, 88, a sex offender of Hull Prison who claims his rights were breached by rules which denied him the right to vote.

Others mounting a claim include David Mulcahy, the ‘Railway Rapist’, jailed for a minimum of 30 years for three murders and seven rapes which took place in the early 1980s, as well as Peter Chester, 60, serving life for raping and strangling his seven-year-old niece, Donna Gillbanks, in Blackpool in 1977.

Horncy and Regan were sentenced to whole-life terms for the murder of the Chohan family.

Upon sentencing, Judge Stephen Mitchell told them: “Your crimes are uniquely terrible.

“The cold-blooded murders of an eight-week-old baby and an 18-month-old toddler, not to mention the murder of their mother, father and grandmother, provide a chilling insight into the utterly perverted standards by which you have lived your lives.

“Your characters are as despicable as your crimes. Each of you is a practiced, resourceful and manipulative liar.”

Their murder trial was one of the longest in criminal history, and cost more than £10million.