Security sources in the North believe the group which killed the north Belfast Catholic at the weekend and an RUC officer last month is composed of the remnants of the splinter paramilitary group, the Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF).
The new group, the Red Hand Defenders, is said to contain only a small number of people, and until the weekend it had been thought it was confined to the Portadown/Mid Ulster area.
The weekend murder will cause the RUC to assess whether or not there is an emerging loyalist threat to the peace.
The LVF itself was the last loyalist group to call a ceasefire, doing so three months ago. It is understood the LVF leadership is currently pressing hard to have its cessation recognised with the same benefits from the British authorities, mainly the early release of its 30 members in the Maze Prison.
There have been repeated hints that the LVF is prepared to decommission weapons, something which the main paramilitary groups are so far refusing to do.
The LVF was one of the most serious problems facing the peace process in Northern Ireland until last year when its leader, Billy Wright, was imprisoned. He was shot dead on December 27th by an Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) prisoner.
After Wright's murder his supporters in the LVF and the larger paramilitary organisation, the Ulster Defence Association (UDA), went on a sectarian murder campaign, killing 12 Catholics from January to March last.
The geographical spread of these murders was an indication of where hardline sectarian anti-agreement loyalism was still in existence.
Most took place in north or south Belfast where there is a hard core of ex-UDA loyalists who supported Billy Wright. The murder of the Catholic man, Mr Brian Service, fits the pattern of random sectarian murder which has marked the work of these loyalists.
The previous murder by the group, and the first occasion on which the Red Hand Defenders title was used, was that of Constable Frank O'Reilly, the RUC officer who died on October 6th from shrapnel injuries caused when he caught the full force of a grenade explosion during loyalist rioting in Portadown a month earlier.
Between these two deaths there has been some minor sectarian violence which might be ascribed to the dissidents. Just over two weeks ago, a caller claiming to be from the Red Hand Defenders gave a warning that it had planted a bomb at the Sinn Fein youth conference in Dublin on Saturday, October 10th. It was this threat which led the Garda Special Branch to station two plainclothes officers outside the conference hall.
The latest killing in Belfast underlines concerns in the security forces about the type of figures who are emerging to fill the vacuum left by the effective closedown of the main paramilitary organisations.
On both the republican and loyalist sides there is concern, as the Omagh bombing on August 15th showed, that dissidents can grow relatively quickly. While none of the dissident groups is a threat to the overall peace, they represent a residual danger to the civilian population of the North.