Roddy Hackett . . . whose brother Dermott was shot dead by the UFF near Omagh in 1987 . . . shook hands with the notorious killer during a sensational face-to-face meeting chaired by Nobel Peace Prizewinner Archbishop Desmond Tutu earlier this year.

Speaking to the Sunday Tribune this weekend, Roddy Hackett said: "I think that this man is a publicity seeker. He seems to crave getting back into the limelight. When he was first released from prison, he was taken around and heralded as the great saviour of the Ulster cause and loyalist paramilitarism. Now he doesn't get that attention so he probably misses it. It also looks as if he is having some sort of breakdown."

Hackett and his brother Dermott's widow, Sylvia, met Stone last March for the filming of the BBC's landmark Facing the Truth series, to find out the truth behind allegations in Stone's autobiography that he did not murder the fatherof-two. Stone admitted that he arranged Hackett's murder and said he would have "pulled the trigger" if he had been present. The secret encounter took place at Ballywalter in the Ards Peninsula, where victims and perpetrators of violence in the Troubles were brought together for the first time.

Roddy Hackett said: "Before we met him, we were taken into separate rooms in the big old house in Ballywalter. I had a picture in my head of the door bursting open and a man full of bravado coming in. I could hear this tipping come up a long corridor and I was shocked to see this menial little man with a walking stick come through the door to meet us. He was a man you would see outside the post office queuing for the pension."

Stone, a UFF member who is infamous for his 1988 gun and grenade attack which killed three men at Milltown cemetery in Belfast, was convicted of killing Hackett on 23 May 1987, as well as five others.

Roddy Hackett added: "For a man that was so meticulous in planning my brother's shooting, it was a foolish move to run into Milltown cemetery like that. The incident at Stormont was something similar, and maybe the pressure got to him again or maybe he just wants the publicity. He is a bit of a Walter Mitty character."