Irish Protestant Group Pledges to Disarm

A mural from the loyalist terror group the Ulster Volunteer Force in North Belfast, Northern Ireland, Thursday, May, 3, 2007. The Command Staff of the Ulster Volunteer Force and Red Hand Commando announced that all its units and departments would stand down and will assume a nonmilitary, civilianized role. (AP Photo/Peter Morrison) (Peter Morrison - AP)

Paula Dobriansky, the U.S. envoy to Northern Ireland, said the UVF statement offered "a clear recognition that the people of Northern Ireland want peace and stability." She said UVF words must be followed "with concrete actions, including decommissioning" arms.

British security officials say the UVF today is relatively poorly armed with stocks of aged rifles, handguns and a few machine guns. They say the group's members might fear appearing fully unarmed _ mainly because their numerous enemies in other Protestant gangs also haven't disarmed.

After the UVF's 1994 cease-fire, its members were implicated in about 20 killings, but it rarely mounted attacks on the Catholic community. Instead, it turned to deadly criminal feuds with UVF dissidents and racketeering rivals in other Protestant paramilitary groups.

In 2005, the International Monitoring Commission said the UVF killed four people as part of a wider campaign to crush a breakaway gang, the Loyalist Volunteer Force. The panel, which Britain and Ireland appointed to assess paramilitary behavior, also accused UVF members of shooting repeatedly at police and directing Protestant mob violence.

The panel's latest report, published April 25, said the UVF remained deeply involved in extortion, counterfeiting and petty assaults, but was withdrawing from drug dealing.

The UVF has killed about 540 people in all. UVF gangs abducted, tortured and killed lone Catholics after forcing bogus "confessions" of IRA membership. Other times, entire pubs in Catholic areas were bombed or sprayed with gunfire.

Spence, who was convicted of committing the UVF's first three murders in 1966, gained political sophistication and day-to-day contact with Catholics while behind bars.

He said Thursday that, with hindsight, much of what the UVF did was misguided and had consigned two generations to a spiral of tit-for-tat bloodshed.

"My whole life is strewn with regrets," he said.