Two men were arrested yesterday in connection with the attempted murder of the former IRA informer, Mr Martin McGartland (29), who was shot six times in an attack outside his home in Whitley Bay in June.
The men, a 32-year-old from Belfast who was arrested in the city by the RUC and taken to Northumbria, and a 33-year-old Glasgow man arrested in Glasgow, are being held for questioning at an undisclosed police station in the Northumbria area on suspicion of conspiracy to murder Mr McGartland. They can be held for 72 hours without charge.
Speaking from what was termed "safe house", Mr McGartland said last night he believed one of the men responsible for the shooting was recently released from the Maze prison under the terms of the Belfast Agreement's early prisoner release scheme.
"I am in a position that it makes no difference whether these men are charged or not. The IRA did this, and there are hundreds of others lined up to do the job they carried out. The IRA carried this out, and there was no reason why anyone else would sit in my garden and shoot at me."
Mr McGartland infiltrated the IRA and worked as an agent for the RUC Special Branch between 1988 and 1991 during which time he claimed he saved the lives of 50 men, a subject he later wrote about in his books, Fifty Dead Men Walking and Dead Man Running. He fled Northern Ireland in 1991, leaving his girlfriend and two sons behind, and later settled in the Whitley Bay area on Tyneside where he was given a new identity, "Martin Ashe", and a new job.
After lying low for two years, he criticised the police in Britain, claiming they had put his life in danger when his identity was revealed in 1993 after he was prosecuted for motoring offences.