The most senior loyalist paramilitary to become a so-called 'supergrass' has begun giving evidence in the trial of a man charged with the murders of two Catholics by the UVF in Belfast city centre in May 1994.
Father-of-six Eamon Fox, 41, and Gary Convie, a 24-year-old father-of-one, were shot dead while eating their lunch in a car beside a building site where they worked in a loyalist area of the city.
James Smyth. 57, from Forthriver Link in north Belfast is charged with their murders and the attempted murder of another man who was in the back of the car but escaped uninjured.
He denies involvement in the shootings.
Gary Haggarty, 51, a former UVF commander, was called as the key prosecution witness in the non-jury trial this morning.
In 2017, he pleaded guilty to more than 500 offences including five murders, five attempted murders and 23 conspiracies to murder.
The murders he admitted involvement in included those of Eamon Fox and Gary Convie.
Giving evidence with an armed close protection officer sitting nearby, Haggarty told the court that James Smyth had carried out the shooting with a Sten sub machine gun.
The former senior loyalist, who was also a paid RUC Special Branch agent, said he had supervised the test firing of the weapon used the night before the shooting.
He said he told his RUC handlers in advance about the test firing and warned that the weapon was probably going to be used in an attack.
Haggarty asked the trial judge if he could name his handlers in court but was ordered not to do so, but to give him the names on a sheet of paper and refer to them only as A and B.
He told the court that during a meeting in his house on the morning of the shooting the UVF's "military commander" in the area had outlined the plan and that "Jimmy Smyth knew what he had to do".
Haggarty said he walked Smyth to an opening in a fence that he had created to allow him to access a playground from where he would open fire with machine gun concealed under his coat.
He said that in a conversation in a bar three days later, Mr Smyth told him he had "emptied a full clip" of bullets into the car and had shouted "Up the UVF" as he ran away from the scene.
Haggarty said Mr Smyth was excited about what had happened but told him "he was unhappy he didn’t get the guy in the back of the car".
He said he provided his RUC Special Branch handlers with information that led to the recovery of the weapon and other items.
Relatives of Eamon Fox and Gary Convie and other victims of the north Belfast UVF sat in the public gallery close to around a dozen loyalist supporters, some of whom covered their faces on the way into court.
Asked why Eamon Fox and Gary Convie had been targeted, Gary Haggarty told the court it had been for purely sectarian reasons.
He said that they were not in any way credible targets but were "just two Catholic men who went to their work and didn’t come home".
Under cross examination this afternoon, Haggarty conceded that his key motivations for agreeing to become an assisting offender was fear of possible reprisals by the UVF and a desire to spend as little time as possible in prison.
"I just wanted a clean slate, I just wanted to get on with my life," he said.
He told the court he had become a police informer in 1991 and continued to work as a paid agent until 2004.
He repeatedly rejected suggestions that he had not told the entire truth about his involvement in UVF activity during hundreds of hours of interviews by detectives.
Defence lawyer Michael Borrelli KC outlined how the witness had pleaded guilty to more than 500 offences during a 16-year period, including five murders and five attempted murders, after agreeing to enter a process to give evidence on behalf of the public prosecution service.
Asked how he would characterise himself during his time as an active UVF member, Haggarty said he would describe himself as a "violent thug" and would agree that he was "a terrorist".
But he rejected a claim that he was a serial killer, claiming he had only ever been directly involved in one killing.
Asked if he would agree that he had wrongly identified the gunman involved in the murders of Eamon Fox and Gary Convie, he replied: "Definitely not."
He added: "I'm a very dangerous man, that doesn't mean I'm not telling the truth."
The trial continues tomorrow.
