Rob can still remember the burning sensation that coursed through his legs as the gunman fired four bullets into his limbs.
“It might have been eight years ago but I still can remember every second of it,” says Rob (not his real name), as he stands near Derry’s 17th-century walls and the museum dedicated to the Troubles.
“I couldn’t believe what was happening … the gunman just walked up to me as casually as you like, took out a pistol and fired at both the right and left legs. When I collapsed I had this burning feeling all over my limbs and right through my body. Yet my main memory is one of astonishment – I could not believe this was happening to me.”
In July 2010, a campaign by a vigilante group known as Republican Action Against Drugs (RAAD) was at its height, with dozens of mainly young men being accused of drug dealing and other antisocial activities in Derry.
Many were forced to leave the city at gunpoint, most of whom were in their teens and early 20s. Rob, however, was an exception – a man in his late 50s who, he claims, was the victim of ill-informed, malicious gossip. RAAD – the nucleus of which later helped form the anti-peace process New IRA terror group – labelled him a drug dealer.
“After I got out of hospital that summer I had to get out of this town for a while. I had been informed that RAAD were not finished with me because some of them wanted to kill me.
“Part of the reason why they continued to hold a very personal grudge against me is that I took part in anti-RAAD demonstrations in Derry following the murder of Andrew Allen in the same year. They objected to me taking part in that demo and even put up my name on some of Derry’s walls with malicious messages like, ‘Why are you killing our children with drugs?’ Which was a joke because it was they who were shooting and killing people.”
Allen was a 24-year-old boxer from the Creggan area of the city who was forced into exile by RAAD after receiving a death threat in 2010. He had to live across the border in County Donegal in the Irish Republic. RAAD accused Allen of being a drug dealer but his family insist to this day that he got into a fight with a dissident republican and got the better of him.
For that alone the Allen family say the dissidents nursed a grudge against him. When Allen defiantly kept returning to Derry to see his family, RAAD decided to make an example of him. They fired shots through the window of his temporary home in Buncrana, Co Donegal, while he was playing on a games console in February 2012.
He was hit several times in the upper body and died from his wounds. His family pointed out that normally he would have played the console alongside his young son, who was fortunate not to be in the house at the time of the attack.
The Guardian has learned that the chief suspect in the Allen murder is also among those whom the Police Service of Northern Ireland suspect of shooting Rob in the same year.
However, Rob has grave doubts that the culprit will ever be brought to justice.
“For 30 years the IRA fought a war with the British security forces and now it has emerged in recent times that the Brits, including the police, had the Provisional IRA heavily infiltrated. They had scores of agents in the most efficient armed group anywhere in the world.
“Are you telling me the police and MI5 don’t have a same grip in terms of intelligence inside those dissident groups today? Yet the clear-up rate for catching people behind these so-called punishment shootings is next to zero. The cops know who is doing what but don’t seem interested in stopping them. It seems to me that so long as the dissidents keep their shootings in-house, inside their own communities, they are going to get away with it,” Rob says.
Still in fear of publicly speaking out using his own name, Rob says he knows one of the other victims, a 15-year-old who was assaulted by the New IRA.
“He was only a kid and they broke both his legs and his ankles for so-called antisocial behaviour. Maybe he smoked a bit of weed or something, I don’t know. But he was only 15 for God’s sake, just a boy.”