John Gregg

Gregg was born in 1957 and raised in a Protestant family from the Tigers Bay area of North Belfast.

Gregg when explaining his family background, revealed that his father, regarded as a quiet man, had trust in the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) and British Army but joined the loyalist vigilante groups set up around the start of the Troubles ostensibly to protect the Protestant community from attacks by republicans.

His own earliest memory of the Troubles was the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association marches in Derry, a movement to which Gregg and his family were strongly opposed.

Gregg joined the Ulster Young Militants (UYM), the youth wing of the loyalist paramilitary Ulster Defence Association (UDA) at the age of 14.

He spent six months in jail for rioting in 1977.

He later became part of the UDA South East Antrim Brigade.

Members of this brigade were believed to be behind the killings of Catholic postman Danny McColgan, Protestant teenager Gavin Brett and Trevor Lowry (the latter kicked to death in the mistaken belief he was a Catholic), and a spate of pipe bomb attacks on the homes of Catholics.

In 1984, Gregg seriously wounded Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams in an assassination attempt.

On 14 March 1984, he severely wounded Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams in an attack supposedly ordered as a response to the earlier killings of Ulster Unionist Party politicians Robert Bradford and Edgar Graham.

Gregg, at the time the head of the UDA group in Rathcoole, was in charge of a three-man hit team that pulled up alongside Adams' car near Belfast City Hall and opened fire injuring Adams and his three fellow passengers, who nonetheless escaped to seek treatment at the Royal Victoria Hospital, Belfast.

Gregg and his team were apprehended almost immediately by a British Army patrol that opened fire on them before ramming their car.

The attack had been known in advance by security forces due to a tip-off from informants within Rathcoole; Adams and his co-passengers had survived in part because Royal Ulster Constabulary officers, acting on the informants' information, had replaced much of the ammunition in the UDA's Rathcoole weapons dump with low-velocity bullets.

From the 1990s until he was shot dead in 2003 by rival associates, Gregg served as brigadier of the UDA's South East Antrim Brigade.

Widely known as a man with a fearsome reputation, Gregg was considered a "hawk" in some loyalist circles.

Gregg was sentenced to 18 years in prison; however, he only served nine years before he was released in 1993.

When asked by the BBC in prison if he regretted anything about the shooting, his reply was, "Only that I didn't succeed."

Following his release from prison, Gregg returned to Rathcoole, where he again became an important figure, taking a central role in the illegal drug trade, with his Rathcoole stronghold a centre of narcotics.

Sometime after the Combined Loyalist Military Command of 1994 he succeeded Joe English, who had emerged as a leading figure in the Ulster Democratic Party, as so-called brigadier of the South-East Antrim UDA.

Under Gregg the South-East Antrim Brigade were prepared to ignore the terms of the loyalist ceasefire, such as on 25 April 1997 when he dispatched a five-man team to Carrickfergus to set fire to a Catholic church in retaliation for a similar attack on a Protestant church in East Belfast (this earlier attack had actually been organised by dissident loyalists seeking to provoke the UDA into returning to violence).

Gregg's fearsome reputation earned him the nickname "the Reaper" and he bore a tattoo of the Grim Reaper on his back as a tribute.

Gregg played the bass drum in the UDA-affiliated flute band Cloughfern Young Conquerors, a loyalist flute band which police claimed regularly caused trouble at Orange Order parades.

In late August 1997 this band was one of a number of similar flute bands to travel to Derry for the annual Apprentice Boys of Derry march through the city centre.

As the band prepared to take the train home that evening they met members of the Shankill Protestant Boys, another band in town for the parade that was affiliated to the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF).

Brawls between the two had been frequent and tensions had been growing between the UDA and UVF leading to a drink-fuelled pitched battle between the two groups at the train station.

During the course of the melee a Shankill Protestant Boys member managed to gouge out Gregg's eye, although it is also claimed that Gregg lost his eye due to a fight with republicans at the same parade.

Along with Jackie McDonald and Billy McFarland, fellow brigadiers on the UDA's Inner Council, Gregg was lacking in enthusiasm for the Belfast Agreement when it appeared in 1998.

Throughout 1999 his brigade continued to be active, undertaking a pipe bomb campaign against Catholic homes whilst on 12 May members of his brigade shot and wounded a Catholic builder in Carrickfergus under the cover name "Protestant Liberation Force".

Much of this activity was inspired by Gregg's personal hatred of Catholics.

A senior police source once described him as a man driven by "pure and absolute bigotry".

Gregg was also characterised as "a bully, a racketeer, and a sectarian bigot who took particular delight in carrying out vicious punishment attacks and randomly targeting Roman Catholics."

In 2000 he helped to ensure that a proposal before the Inner Council to initiate the decommissioning of weapons was rejected.

Having witnessed demographic shifts in Glengormley and Crumlin, traditionally loyalist majority towns that had come to have nationalist majorities on account of loyalists moving out of Belfast, he determined that the same thing would not happen in Carrickfergus and Larne and so launched a campaign of pipe bomb and arson attacks on Catholic homes there (despite these towns having very small Catholic populations).

The main target proved to be Danny O'Connor, a Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) representative on initially Larne Borough Council and then the Northern Ireland Assembly, whose home and office were attacked at least 12 times by Gregg's men between 2000 and 2002.

Catholic workman Gary Moore was killed in Monkstown in 2000 in another killing attributed to Gregg's unit.

Protestant Trevor Lowry (aged 49) was beaten to death in Glengormley by UDA members under Gregg's command on 11 April 2001 after he was mistaken for a Catholic.

In 2001, Gregg's reign of terror in Rathcoole, where drug dealing, knee-capping and savage beatings were the norm, was challenged by local British Labour Party Councillor Mark Langhammer, who also objected to Gregg's close links to neo-Nazi groups in Great Britain.

He called on the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) to establish an auxiliary police "clinic" on the estate, which had no permanent police building, so that locals concerned about crime could have somewhere to go.

On 4 September 2001, Langhammer's car was blown up outside his Whiteabbey home by Gregg's men, although Langhammer himself was asleep at the time and no one was injured.

This followed in summer 2002 when a community centre was taken over for this purpose although Gregg's UDA objected and daubed the building with the word "tout".

John Gregg (1957 – 1 February 2003) was a senior member of the UDA/UFF loyalist paramilitary organisation in Northern Ireland.