SF and PUP face cash penalties

Northern Secretary Paul Murphy has confirmed Sinn Féin and the Progressive Unionist Party will have their British government grants withheld as punishment for alleged ongoing activities by the IRA and Ulster Volunteer Force.

The financial penalty against the two parties was recommended in the first report from the Independent Monitoring Commission, which is due to be published this afternoon.

The report is believed to detail a range of criminal and paramilitary activities by both republican and loyalist groups and is also believed to accuse senior Sinn Féin members of being leading IRA figures.

The Irish and British governments asked the IMC to compile the report earlier than planned following allegations of IRA involvement in the attempted abduction of a dissident republican in Belfast in February.

The IMC was established last year to monitor the status of paramilitary ceasefires.

Sinn Féin is vehemently opposed to the commission, which it believes was set up outside the terms of the Good Friday Agreement as a tool to undermine the republican movement.

On the loyalist side, the IMC report accused the Ulster Defence Association of carrying out five murders in recent times, four of them during internal feuding.

Those murders included the killing of John Gregg, a former commander of the organisation, in February 2003.

The UDA was also blamed for killing a 21-year-old Catholic man, James McMahon, in a sectarian attack in Lisburn last November.

The Ulster Volunteer Force, meanwhile, which is linked with the PUP, was blamed for two murders and a recent spate of racist attacks on ethnic minorities in the North.