[7] In September 2004, Ken Barrett, an UDA member who was recruited as an informer by the Royal Ulster Constabulary's Special Branch after confessing to the shooting, pleaded guilty to his murder.
This review, led by Sir Desmond de Silva, released a report in December 2012 acknowledging that the case entailed "a wilful and abject failure by successive Governments".
A third brother, Seamus, was the fiancé of Mairead Farrell, one of the IRA trio shot dead by the Special Air Service (SAS) in Gibraltar in March 1988.
He also represented other IRA and Irish National Liberation Army hunger strikers who died during the 1981 Maze prison protest, Brian Gillen, and the widow of Gervaise McKerr, one of three men shot dead by the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) in a shoot-to-kill incident in 1982.
Stobie reported the incident to his RUC handlers a few days later, and subsequent enquiries matched the pistol's serial number to the batch that was stolen from Palace Barracks.
Ken Barrett, who was also an RUC Special Branch agent, then drove the mini-cab to the Antrim Road area, with two UDA gunmen as passengers.
The hit team arrived at the Finucane family home on Fortwilliam Drive at 7:30pm, and while Barrett waited in the car the two gunmen kicked down the front door of the house and ran inside.
[22] They entered the kitchen where Finucane had been having a Sunday meal with his family and immediately opened fire with a 9mm pistol and a .38 revolver, shooting him twice and knocking him to the floor.
The senior officer heading the CID team was Detective Superintendent Alan Simpson, who set up a major incident room inside the RUC D Division Antrim Road station.
[28] In 2000, Amnesty International demanded that the then Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Peter Mandelson, open a public inquiry into events surrounding his death.
In 2001, as a result of the Weston Park talks, a retired Canadian Judge Peter Cory was appointed by the governments of Britain and Ireland to investigate the allegations of collusion by British and Irish security forces in the killing of Finucane, Robert Hamill, Harry Breen, Bob Buchanan and other individuals during the Troubles.
[28] In June 2005, the then Irish Taoiseach Bertie Ahern told Mitchell Reiss, the US Special Envoy to Northern Ireland, that "everyone knows" the UK government was involved in the murder of Pat Finucane.
[30] On 17 May 2006, the United States House of Representatives then passed a resolution calling on the British government to hold an independent public inquiry into Finucane's killing.
[32] Finucane's widow, Geraldine, has written letters repeating this request to all the senior judges in Great Britain, and took out a full-page advertisement in the newspaper The Times to draw attention to the campaign.
[36] Based on conversations she had had with Peter Cory, Finucane's widow subsequently claimed that Margaret Thatcher, the UK Prime Minister at the time of the murder, "knew exactly what was going on".
[12] The report documented extensive evidence of State collaboration with loyalist gunmen, including the selection of targets, and concluded that "there was a wilful and abject failure by successive governments to provide the clear policy and legal framework necessary for agent-handling operations to take place effectively within the law.
[14] In May 2013, state documents dated 2011 disclosed through the courts revealed that David Cameron's former director of security and intelligence, Ciaran Martin, had warned him that senior members of Margaret Thatcher's government may have been aware of "a systemic problem with loyalist agents" at the time of Pat Finucane's death but had done nothing about it.
[40] In February 2019, the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom ruled in agreement with the Finucane family, finding unanimously that the UK had failed to uphold article 2 of the European convention on human rights, which among other things obliges signatories to adequately investigate state-caused deaths.
[41] On 12 October 2020, the Northern Ireland Secretary, Brandon Lewis, committed to reach a decision on or before 30 November 2020 on whether a public inquiry would be held into the murder.
[43] On 26 November 2020, 24 members of the United States Congress urged Boris Johnson's government to set up a public inquiry into the murder of Pat Finucane.
[47] Although the announcement was welcomed by civil rights groups,[48] the decision was criticised by some,[49][50] such as the Democratic Unionist Party leader Gavin Robinson, who said that it "perpetuates a hierarchy and sends the message that this murder was more deserving of investigation than others".