Unionist politicians blame the IRA for a spate of recent robberies but police are reluctant to point the finger at any one group, writes Dan Keenan, Northern News Editor.
Cash and tobacco, worth £2 million, have been stolen in a series of armed robberies in the North in the last six weeks.
On the night of September 13th armed and masked men burst into a family home at Saul, outside Downpatrick, Co Down.
The mother, her son and a daughter were taken by car to an empty house in south Belfast and detained overnight.
In the morning the father, who works for a security firm, was told by the gang members to turn up as usual at his depot. He was ordered to drive his van to a golf club in south Belfast where a sum, thought to be £500,000, was stolen. The gang escaped.
The family managed to escape uninjured but traumatised.
On Friday, October 1st, in Ardoyne, north Belfast, a gang held a mother and child while the father was ordered to turn up for work on the Saturday morning.
They ordered him to work normally at Gallaher's warehouse where he is employed. The gang brought a 40-ft Leyland Daf lorry to the warehouse and loaded it with a consignment of tobacco estimated to be worth between £1.2 and £2 million.
While no one was physically injured, police say the family were left severely traumatised.
Up to five men burst into a house in the Oldpark area on October 17th. They took a man and two children, aged three and six, at gunpoint to a derelict house along the Seven Mile Straight near Antrim town.
The little girls, clothed only in their nightdresses, were held overnight with their father, while the children's mother was held captive alone in the family home.
The next morning the woman was forced to go and empty the contents of a safe at a local post office where she works. A substantial sum, thought to be tens of thousands of pounds, was stolen in what was the seventh robbery at the branch this year.
The man, whose shoes had been taken, and the barefoot girls freed themselves and got help by flagging down a passing car.
Last Tuesday thieves threatened a man with a gun at the North West Liquor Store in Omagh, Co Tyrone, before tying him up and stealing a significant quantity of cigarettes. One of the thieves, posing as a Royal Mail employee, gained entry to the premises before binding the man's hands and feet.
Three other gang members then arrived and began loading a white Transit van with cigarettes worth £100,000.
The man was eventually able to free his legs and ran out into the road to summon help, his hands still tied. Insp George Douglas said it was possible paramilitaries were responsible but would go no further.
Beyond generalities, police are reluctant to indicate their thinking on the robberies and the hostage-taking. Rather than point the finger at any one group, one reliable PSNI source referred to the imminent publication by the Independent Monitoring Commission of its second report on ongoing paramilitary activity.
However, the PSNI has informed The Irish Times that the number of such crimes is not significantly beyond that recorded the previous year. While 37 so-called "tiger kidnaps" were recorded in Northern Ireland last year, this year's total is 40.
Mr Sam Kinkaid, an Assistant Chief Constable, told the Policing Board earlier this month: "All paramilitary groups in the last five to six months have been involved in serious robberies on both sides of the community."
Although the IRA is suspected of involvement in the £1.2 million cigarette raid, republican sources in Belfast close to the organisation's strategy have tried to distance it from the raid.
With the future of the paramilitaries a key issue at the centre of political contacts among the North's parties and the British and Irish governments, the PSNI appears to favour caution in its public comments.
Politicians, on the other hand, feel much less restrained.
For the DUP, the robberies illustrate the endemic criminality of the paramilitaries. The Ulster Unionists say it is paramilitary activity and not differences over the minutiae of the Belfast Agreement that is holding up the political process.
The SDLP believes the paramilitaries have shunned the will of the people who voted for the Belfast Agreement.
One party member, pointing out that both loyalist and IRA ceasefires in 1994 were preceded by a short-term rise in violence, hopes the recent spate of robberies may signal the beginning of the end.
The hope is that significant thefts are carried out by armed groups who know that the game is finally up and who are out to finance a more comfortable retirement.