THE INLA has claimed it warned the Northern Ireland prison authorities that Billy “King Rat” Wright was in mortal danger four days before the group shot him dead in the Maze.

Republican sources told The Sunday Times this weekend that the terror group met prison officers on December 23, 1997, to relay fears that their

prisoners would kill the Loyalist Volunteer Force founder unless he was moved out of the same H-Block where INLA inmates were housed.

On December 27, Wright was shot dead by two INLA prisoners while he sat in a van waiting for prison officers to drive him to another part of the Maze.

“As late as December 23, INLA leadership representatives met representatives of the prison service and told them that unless Wright was moved, he’d be iced,” said the source.

According to the source, among those who attended the meeting was Willie Gallagher from Strabane, a former hunger striker, and several others from the leadership of the INLA in Belfast who explicitly told the prison service that Wright’s life was in danger. Republicans were adamant that Wright was conducting a campaign of sectarian murder from his cell.

Separately, it has transpired from prison documents presented to the Billy Wright inquiry that the authorities had considered moving Wright to a prison in England at one point, so that he would not be made a martyr.

Times Recommends

• The Japanese Prime Minister is doomed: or is he?
• Brighton company 'involved in cyber attack'
• The art of survival: it’s all in the mind