UDA carry out brutal murder

The unionist paramilitary UDA has been accused of bludgeoning a man to death in an alleyway on Saturday.

Thomas Hollran lost his fight for life yesterday afternoon after he was set upon late on Saturday night as he walked to his sister’s house in the hardline loyalist Woodburn estate in Carrickfergus, County Antrim.

He was targeted yards from her home. Two teenagers later found him dying in an alleyway nearby.

So ferocious were the blows in-flicted on Mr Hollran that his sisters were advised against seeing him as he clung on to life in hospital.

Her brother had been forced to leave his home in the town months earlier after the UDA accused him of indecent exposure.

Mr Hollran, who was separated from his wife, had been living in a south Belfast hostel.

DORRIAN ARRESTS

Three men were arrested today in connection with the murder of Lisa Dorrian last year.

Members of the unionist paramilitary LVF have been linked to the killing.

A police spokeswoman said two men aged 18 and one aged 23 were being questioned after graffiti identifying one of the main suspects in the murder was daubed on walls. The graffiti, which named one of the last men to see her alive, said: “Tell the police where Lisa’s body is and live.”

ADAIR BELIEVES IRA

The former UDA leader in west Belfast, Johnny ‘Mad Dog’ Adair, has call for all loyalists to trust the IRA.

Adair said the unionist community should accept the IRA’s statement last July that its war is finished for good.

Speaking in exile from Scotland, he said he believed the IRA was sincere and had decommissioned almost all of its weapons. ‘I believe the IRA and their statement last July,’ he said. ‘Their armed struggle is over. I hate them, but I believe them when they say they are sincere. I believe them when they said they decommissioned their arms... they are sincere about the war being over.’

In an exclusive interview with The Observer, Adair was asked if unionists should share power with Sinn Féin at Stormont. ‘Absolutely. Why not? It’s time for politics, although our politicians have let the people down. I believe the war is over and the loyalist people should take what the IRA did very seriously. I fought the war against them, there’s nobody like myself and C company that had them on the run. But the IRA decommissioned, something they said they would never do. So the Protestant people should accept that,’ he replied.

On his former UDA comrades, Adair said that he did not think they had the capability to carry out their vow to hunt down and kill him.

PEACE FUNDS UDA MAN

Police investigating the alleged money-laundering activities of leading unionist paramilitary Andre Shoukri are understood to be probing claims that he siphoned off tens of thousands of pounds of ‘peace’ funding.

The 28-year-old UDA ‘brigadier’ was charged last November with money laundering, extortion and blackmail after a six-month investigation in north Belfast.

However, Shoukri has now been accused of misappropriating European Unionist peace funding from a paramilitary prisoners’ office.

VICTIM’S FAMILY MEETS KILLER

Relatives of a Catholic man murdered by UDA hitman, Michael Stone, have shaken hands with the notorious killer during a meeting chaired by Nobel Peace Prize winner, Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

The brother and widow of 37-year-old, Dermot Hackett, who was shot dead by the UDA near Omagh, County Tyrone, in 1987, met Stone in a bid to find out the truth behind allegations in his autobiography that he did not murder the father of two.

Stone admitted to Sylvia and Roddy Hackett that he arranged Mr Hackett’s murder and said he would have “pulled the trigger” if he had been present.

The encounter took place at Ballywalter, in the Ards Peninsula, for a forthcoming BBC Two series called Facing The Truth which brings victims and perpetrators of violence in the conflict together for the first time.

Urgent Appeal