A Northern Ireland journalist, Mr Martin O'Hagan, was shot dead last night as he walked home from the centre of Lurgan, Co Armagh.
Mr O'Hagan (51), the father of three daughters, had spent the evening with friends in a local public house and was shot at about 10.30 p.m. by a gunman waiting in a van. He was returning home with his wife, Marie, when he was killed.
The body remained at the scene of the shooting early this morning, covered by a white sheet.
It is believed the assassination may have been carried out by loyalists because of articles Mr O'Hagan had written in the Northern Ireland edition of the Sunday World about their activities. Local sources said it was likely that the dissident Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF) was responsible.
A colleague of Mr O'Hagan in the Belfast office of the Sunday World, Mr Hugh Jordan, said last night that the journalist had lived in Lurgan for many years.
"He was a man of routine and liked to go home from Belfast on a Friday evening and meet his friends in Lurgan", he said.
The Sunday World's Crime Editor, Mr Paul Williams, who has himself been the subject of death threats, said: "Marty was a great colleague. Everybody here is devastated and we are reliving the horror of what happened to Veronica Guerin all over. Marty was threatened before in 1992 when he exposed the activities of Billy Wright and the LVF."
Mr O'Hagan began his journalistic career with a Northern Ireland political journal, Fortnight , in 1985. He studied journalism in his late thirties after serving a short term of imprisonment for firearms offences related to his involvement with the Official IRA. He was interned in Long Kesh in the early 1970s.
He worked briefly for The Irish Times before joining the Sunday World under its then Northern Editor, Mr Jim Campbell. Mr Campbell was himself the subject of an assassination attempt in 1984 when he was shot by the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) at his home in north Belfast.
Mr O'Hagan had previously been the subject of death threats. In 1992, he had to leave his home in Lurgan and work in the Republic after a number of articles he wrote about Billy Wright, the dissident loyalist terrorist. Wright tried to kill Mr O'Hagan on at least one occasion.
Mr O'Hagan worked for over a year in Cork and Dublin for the Sunday World before returning to Northern Ireland to resume his journalistic career.
Wright was himself shot dead in the Maze Prison on New Year's Day, 1998.
There has been residual hatred of Mr O'Hagan within dissident loyalist circles since.