ONLY the location of Hugh Torney's death - in Lurgan, Co Armagh - on Tuesday night, was surprising.
It was almost certain that he would die violently. But it was thought more likely he would have met his end in his true environment, one or other of the nationalist housing estates of Belfast.
A former republican figure recently said that having Torney around Belfast was like having a Quentin Tarantino movie shot in your neighbourhood.
Except when it overstepped the bounds of acceptability (whatever they are) such as when nine year old Barbara McAlorum was shot dead, Torney's feuding with his former INLA colleagues had become a dark entertainment in Belfast.
His last exploit shooting and seriously injuring a former friend in Ballymurphy on a Saturday morning when the area was busy with shoppers and playing children was typical Torney.
His getaway car broke down and, after heated words with his driver, he stepped into Springfield Road and, with an AK47 - held up a motorist before making off in his car.
Torney had reached the point where he no longer cared about hiding his identity.
He grew up in Ballymurphy and lived there for most of his life - when not on the run - and was recognised by many people. The attempted assassination also took place only 100 yards from the joint RUC army barracks in the former Henry Taggart Memorial Hall on Springfield Road.
His killing in Lurgan on Tuesday night is another grim landmark in the extraordinary history of internal feuding in the INLA.
In the past decade, almost 30 members of an organisation which rarely held more than 150 to 200 active members have been killed in a succession of bloody feuds.
Since its creation in the early 1970s, the INLA has been a wasps' nest of the most extreme elements within the republican tradition, people who are prepared to strike at the most innocuous and innocent British, unionist or Protestant targets.
Its earliest members included those within the Official IRA who assassinated Senator John Barnhill, who was shot dead at his home in Derry in December 1971. They had also attempted to assassinate Unionist MP Mr John Taylor. The shooting dead by this element of a young off duty British soldier, Ranger William Best, in Derry in May 1974 finally convinced the remainder of, the Official IRA to call an end to its armed campaign.
The violent elements abandoned by the Officials found a home in the left wing republican movement that grew into the Irish Republican Socialist Party which, at its inception in 1975, immediately created a paramilitary wing, the INLA.
The organisation's first leader, Seamus Costello, was assassinated by former Official IRA colleagues in Dublin the following year.
The left wing Protestant leader of the INLA and IRSP in Belfast, Ronnie Bunting, son of former Paisleyite Maj Ronald Bunting, was assassinated by loyalists in 1981, leaving the organisation in the hands of the "military" figures like Hugh Torney.
Within a year of Bunting's death, Belfast INLA members were feuding, with a successful putsch by Torney and his associates.
Three years later the Belfast INLA was in the dock on the evidence of former associates who had turned "supergrass".
Principal INLA supergrass Harry Kirkpatrick implicated 32 men. All were acquitted and freed when the courts finally rejected his evidence as completely unreliable.
Within months of their release, after two years in detention, the former associates were rowing again. A three month feud erupted in which 12 people died.
Torney was in the thick of it. At the outset, he had been present in the Rosnaree Hotel, outside Drogheda, when he and two associates, Thomas "Ta" Power and James O'Reilly, were ambushed. His two comrades were shot dead.
The man who led the ambush - was Gerard Steenson, a vicious killer who had earned various nicknames including "Dr Death" and "Pretty Boy".
Three months after Rosnaree, Torney and his reassembled corps caught up with Steenson and shot him dead as he returned from a night's drinking to a house in Ballymurphy.
Former associates now blame Torney for all the INLA's woes, saying he played a crucial role throughout the internal splits and feuds.
Part of the reason Kirkpatrick decided to turn Queen's evidence and finger his old friends, exmembers say, was because Torney had arranged the murder of Kirkpatrick's friend, Gerard "Sparky" Barkley.
Torney disliked Barkley, who was the nearest thing the INLA had to a successful gunman - he had killed four off duty members of the security forces - and lured him across the Border to a house in Dundalk.
There, Barkley was killed in the presence of Dominic and Mary McGlinchey, both of whom were also to die as a result of internal republican feuding.
Another person present, exmembers say, was Gino Gallagher, who was shot dead in January this year at the outset of the latest feud.
Strangely, Torney never saw himself as an instigator of internal disputes or part of the problem in the INLA.
Two years ago, while showing to a Belfast journalist a photograph of the members of the original Belfast INLA posing happily together in a prison yard, Torney - wondered aloud where had it all gone wrong. At least two of the young men in the picture had died at his hands.