The convicted UFF murderer, Michael Stone, who killed three people in a gun and grenade attack in a Belfast graveyard in 1988 and was convicted of three other sectarian murders, is among a group of prisoners due to be released from the Maze Prison today.
Some 86 Maze prisoners will walk free this week as the British government implements the final prison-release phase of the Belfast Agreement, leaving the prison, which once held thousands of men, almost empty. Those to be released include some of the most notorious figures to emerge in the decades of violence in Northern Ireland.
However there is doubt if those released will include James McArdle, who has served two years of a 25-year sentence for the IRA's Canary Wharf bomb of February 1996, which killed two people, injured 40 others and ended the IRA ceasefire in 1996.
McArdle's co-accused, Michael Caraher, will be released. He reputedly was the gunman who shot dead Lance Bombardier Stephen Restorick, the last British soldier to die in the Troubles.
Others are the IRA "Border sniper", Bernard McGinn, who was also implicated in the manufacture of the Canary Wharf bomb and was found guilty of three IRA single-shot sniper attacks, and another IRA bomber, Sean Kelly, who was part of the IRA unit which carried out the Shankill Road fishshop bombing in Belfast in October 1993. The bomb killed nine Protestant civilians as well as his comrade, Thomas Begley.
Only some 40 men will remain imprisoned for "political" crimes in the Republic and United Kingdom by the end of this week.
The last five Provisional IRA prisoners in the Republic include four men convicted of the manslaughter of Det Garda Jerry McCabe in Adare, Co Limerick, in May 1996, and a fifth man who was convicted of conspiracy in the killing.