Loyalist killer's Stormont-attack trial begins

Loyalist killer Michael Stone is due to go on trial today charged with attempting to murder Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness.

The former Ulster Defence Association gunman faces a total of 14 charges at Belfast Crown Court related to the storming of the Northern Assembly in November 2006.

The 53-year-old has been in custody since being detained by security staff at the front doors of the Stormont Parliament Building.

As well as the attempted murder charges, Stone is charged with possessing home-made explosives and a real or imitation gun with intent.

He is also charged with carrying a garrotte, three knives and an axe and assaulting staff members who trapped him in the revolving entrance doors at Stormont.

Stone has denied any intention to harm anyone at Stormont and claimed his attack was “performance art”.

Experts in performance art have been secured to give evidence in Stone’s defence.

Defence lawyer Charles McCreanor told a pre-trial hearing earlier this month: “They believe that they can provide a report of an academic nature.”

The trial is expected to last up to five weeks.

Stone has been in custody since the Stormont incident when the Government cancelled the early release he received under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement from his life sentence for a triple murder.

He became notorious in 1988 when he launched a gun and grenade attack on the republican funeral of three IRA members shot dead by the SAS in Gibraltar.

Three people died and several more were injured before Stone was arrested by police as he fled Milltown Cemetery in west Belfast.