The UVF was responsible for some of the worst sectarian atrocities of the Troubles. The organisation, which took its name from the anti-Home Rule Ulster Volunteer Force established by Sir Edward Carson in 1912, was founded by Gusty Spence in 1966, predating the Provisional IRA.
Its first three victims, a Protestant woman and two Catholic men, who had no IRA connections, were murdered in 1966 when Spence was leader. The UVF sought to justify these killings as a response to the rise in Irish nationalism stemming from that year's 50th anniversary commemorations of the 1916 Easter Rising.
Twenty-eight years later Spence read out the loyalist paramilitary ceasefire statement of October 1994 that expressed "abject and true remorse" to all innocent victims of loyalist violence.
The UVF carried out the Dublin-Monaghan bombings in which 33 people were killed - the largest loss of life in a single day during the Troubles. It was responsible for the McGurks Bar bombing of 1971 in which 15 were killed; it murdered three members of the Miami Showband in 1975; Lenny Murphy's Shankill Butchers in the 1970s were implicated in up to 30 killings.
In 1994 it carried out the attack on the Heights Bar in Loughinisland, Co Down, as patrons were watching the Ireland versus Italy World Cup soccer game on television. They killed six Catholic men including one of the oldest victims of the troubles, 87-year-old Barney Green.
After the 1994 ceasefires its political wing, the Progressive Unionist Party tried to lay political foundations under the late David Ervine and former MLA Billy Hutchinson. Even during this period the UVF was involved in widespread criminality and several killings and feuds including a bitter dispute with the late former UVF Mid-Ulster leader Billy Wright, who later founded the Loyalist Volunteer Force.