Loyalists had threatened murdered journalist

Murdered journalist Martin O’Hagan was threatened by a well-known Loyalist less than a week before his death, it has been disclosed.

Mr O’Hagan, who worked for the northern edition of The Sunday World, was shot dead as he walked home with his wife Marie from their local pub last night in Lurgan, County Armagh.

Senior security sources believe that the LVF, which has a strong presence in Lurgan and nearby Portadown, carried out the killing under the name of the Red Hand Defenders.

The newspaper has given the police the name of a man who has singled him out close to his Westfield Gardens home.

‘He was told by a certain individual ‘we have you clocked walking up and down this street.’ The man who spoke to him is a Loyalist fanatic,’ said Sunday World northern editor Jim McDowell.

Mr O’Hagan had recently been working on a number of stories, involving members of the LVF, the hard-line terror group, which split from the UVF in 1996.

He is also thought to have been working on the links between the illegal drugs trade in the North and certain Loyalist figures.

Detectives in the north are to examine these stories carefully in a bid to catch the murderers.