Timeline of Pat Finucane case
1981 - Pat Finucane comes into the public eye when he acts as solicitor for Bobby Sands during the hunger-striker's successful campaign to be elected as a British MP. He handled the legal affairs of other hunger-strikers in the latter stages of their protest when, the prisoners believed, there would be legal moves made to revive them.
1987 - The British army's secret agent handling team, the Force Research Unit, recruits former loyalist paramilitary Brian Nelson to return to Northern Ireland and become an agent within the Ulster Defence Association. Nelson rises to become the UDA's intelligence chief.
1988 - Pat Finucane becomes widely known in Northern Ireland when he represents the families of three men killed in the so called "shoot to kill" episode in Armagh in 1982. He brought a successful High Court challenge to a coroners ruling that the RUC men involved in the killings should not be called to give evidence.
Pat Fincane represents Patrick McGeown, who was accused of helping to organise the March 1988 killing of two army corporals, when criminal charges against him are dropped.
January 1989 - British home office junior minister Douglas Hogg tells MPs that certain solicitors in Northern Ireland are "unduly sympathetic" to terrorist organisations, indicating he meant the IRA.
February 1989 - Pat Finucane is murdered by loyalist gunmen who burst into his home in north Belfast and shot him multiple times as he was having a meal with his children and wife Geraldine, who was wounded. SDLP and Sinn Féin politicians say Hogg's comments legitimised loyalist attacks on solicitors who represent republicans.
September 1989 - John Stevens, then deputy chief constable of Cambridgeshire Police, is appointed to investigate allegations of collaboration between the security forces and loyalist paramilitaries. A fire at the headquarters of the Stevens team the following January destroys many of their files.
Mr Stevens' investigations primarily dealt with security force files about potential republican assassination targets falling into the hands of loyalist paramilitaries. He found evidence of a "small number" of individual security force members passing on information but said such collusion was "neither widespread nor institutionalised".
January 1992 - Brian Nelson goes on trial at Belfast crown court. Col Gordon Kerr of the Force Research Unit tells the trial Nelson wanted to save lives. He said that Nelson's information allowed him to hand police 730 reports of possible assassination attempts against 217 individuals. Nelson is jailed for 10 years on five counts of conspiracy to murder.
April 1993 - John Stevens begins the second inquiry into the security forces in Northern Ireland.
March 1998 - United Nations special investigator Param Cumaraswamy accuses the RUC of "systematic intimidation" of lawyers representing paramilitary suspects. He calls for an independent inquiry into the killing of Pat Finucane.
April 1999 - John Stevens, now deputy commissioner of the Metropolitan police, returns again to Northern Ireland to launch a third inquiry.
June 1999 - Former UDA quartermaster William Stobie, also a police informant, charged with the murder of Mr Finucane, but later acquitted. He was murdered in December 2001 by the Red Hand Defenders, a cover name used in the past by the UDA and Loyalist Volunteer Force.
