Sean Hughes spent a great deal of his life on the extremes of republican terrorism as a member of the violent splinter group, the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA). Many of his INLA associates, including the assassin Gerard Steenson, Hugh Torney and Gino Gallagher, have since been killed in internal feuds.
In May 1997 Hughes was finally arrested as he attempted to rob a bank in Co Mayo. He was sentenced to eight years.
Hughes joined the INLA with many other teenage gang members in west Belfast in the mid-1970s. The INLA was initially a revolutionary Marxist group which attracted some of the wildest and most dangerous figures to emerge in the Troubles. It attracted left-wing intellectuals in Dublin and working-class Catholic gunmen from the North.
Hughes fled Ireland in 1982 and made his way to Paris where he lived among a coterie of figures from the group's political wing, the Irish Republican Socialist Party (IRSP). In 1986 he was arrested by French police with another Belfast INLA figure while attempting to smuggle weapons into Ireland through the port of Le Havre and was imprisoned for two years.
While he was in custody, the French authorities were served with the warrant for his extradition. The hearing was set for March 1988 when he was due for release.
Remarkably, Hughes was freed when the State failed to send a legal epresentative to the court hearing in Paris to secure his extradition to Dublin on the charge of murdering Garda Reynolds.
This extraordinary set of circumstances led the then head of the Garda Representative Association, Mr Jack Marrinan, to complain of a "half-hearted" response on the part of the Department of Justice.
Mr Marrinan contrasted the State's performance with that of Hughes's defence team led by Mr Patrick MacEntee SC, who made a successful case against extradition. After the failure of the extradition case against him, Hughes fled France and lived for a time in Madagascar with a French woman.
However, it is understood the relationship broke up and he re turned to Belfast about the time of the first IRA ceasefire. According to sources in west Belfast, Hughes spent days in Milltown cemetery at the graves of former associates in the INLA. He offered to join the Provisional IRA but was rejected because of his reputation for unpredictability.
The circumstances of Hughes's continued incarceration were not clear yesterday. Under the terms of the Belfast Agreement, he could apply for early release from his eight-year term for the Fox ford robbery. Even if he is refused early release, he could be free in less than four years.