FORMER UVF leader Billy Hutchinson maintains the two brothers he was convicted of killing had been identified as IRA suspects, despite being reported at the time as a random sectarian attack on the first Catholics the murder squad came across.
Michael Loughran (18) and Edward Morgan (27), were walking to work in October 1974 when they were shot and killed at the junction of Falls Road and Northumberland Street.
Mr Hutchinson and another teenage UVF man, Thomas Winstone, admitted killing the half-brothers from Cupar Street and were given life sentences.
The court heard the victims had been selected at random.
Speaking about the murders in the book My Life In Loyalism, Mr Hutchinson, who drove the car used by the killers, said: "Loughran and Morgan had been identified by the YCV as active republicans. How accurate the information was, I don't know".
"Even though the evidence was clearly pointing toward my involvement in the shooting, I tried to maintain an air of defiance. I sat in the interview room feigning disinterest and told the police lie after lie.
"I tried hard to make it appear that I was an innocent youth. I had to make sure they weren't going to get the truth, as it was of paramount importance that I protected any others who were involved."
The Shankill-born loyalist talks of becoming an official member of the UVF in the summer of 1972 when the Young Ulster Volunteers became part of the organisation. He was later 'promoted' within the paramilitary group to act as a bodyguard for leader Gusty Spence.
Mr Hutchinson reveals the UVF plotted to take guns from Tara, the evangelical, hard-line loyalist group that had some influence in the late 1960s before declining amid a high-profile sex abuse scandal involving its leader William McGrath.
"Although I subsequently learned about the complex sequence of events that shaped the UVF during this period, I had had no idea at the time that they had been carefully infiltrating Tara," he said.
He also said he was a supporter of random attack on Catholics at the time, before later believing they were counter-productive.
"I truly believed that if we pushed the Catholic community to the edge, they would go begging to the IRA to stop their terrorist campaign," he said.
"Random killings were a counterproductive tactic that characterised the rest of the early to mid-1970s, but it was justified within loyalist organisations as ‘terrorising the terrorists’.
"This was pure sectarianism, and it didn’t work. It had the opposite effect and dramatically strengthened support for the IRA in working-class Catholic areas."
Mr Hutchinson went on to be a member of the Progressive Unionist Party negotiating team, who along with the late David Ervine helped negotiate the Good Friday Agreement. He is currently a PUP councillor on Belfast city council.
My Life In Loyalism by Billy Hutchinson is published by Merrion Press, available from Merrion Press, Waterstones, Easons, Amazon and online booksellers.
