The RUC believes the former loyalist shot dead in a Co Down housing estate died as part of a drugs-related feud among former paramilitaries in the North.
Mr William Paul (41) was shot dead outside his home on the loyalist Kilcooley Estate in Bangor yesterday morning as he returned from buying newspapers in a local shop. He was married with three young children.
Mr Paul, a former member of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), is the eighth man with paramilitary associations to be killed in drugs-related violence this year. These killings, compared with a total of 15 deaths resulting from "political" or sectarian violence, indicate the increasing involvement of Northern paramilitary figures in drugs-related crime.
Six of these drugs-related killings this year have been carried out by republican paramilitaries and two by loyalists.
In the past two months there has been something of a feud between former members of the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) with three killed. They were: Mr Mark McNeill (32) shot dead on April 17th; Mr Frank Turley (33) shot dead on June 12th; and Mr John Knocker, shot dead on May 31st.
Two other men connected to drugs have been killed by the IRA. They were Mr Brendan Campbell (30), shot dead on February 9th, and Mr Kevin Conway, killed on February 15th. Loyalists believed to be members of the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) shot dead Mr Terry Enwright (28), a doorman at a Belfast club in an attack prompted by a drugs row. Mr Enwright was not involved in drugs and was shot by accident.
A Belfast man, Mr Thomas Lockard (34), was found stabbed to death at the Border in south Armagh on April 27th. He was a Garda informer who was discovered by a Border drugs gang.
The exact motive for Mr Paul's killing was not clear yesterday. He was a close associate of another ex-loyalist with drugs links, Mr Glen Greer, who was killed in a booby-trap bomb explosion in Bangor last October. Mr Greer was linked to a cross-Border gang with both loyalist and republican links which was smuggling drugs into both Northern Ireland and the Republic.
Mr Paul had been in the UVF until the mid-1980s. He spent two years in prison when he and 35 other men were held on charges based on evidence by the UVF "supergrass", William "Budgie" Allen. Allen later recanted and all were freed. Mr Paul was later intimidated from his home in Belfast and moved to Bangor.