THE most senior British agent to have been exposed as having worked at the heart of Sinn Fein was found murdered at his home last night.
Denis Donaldson had been shot in the head, execution-style, inside the primitive cottage in Glenties, Co Donegal, where he had been living since he was dramatically outed as a spy in December.

Tracked down by an Irish newspaper last month to a cottage in Co Donegal, Mr Donaldson was said to appear gaunt and chastened by his change of circumstances. For years he had been liked, as much by journalists as by fellow republicans, for his humour, sharp mind and evident pleasure in the finer things in life. Little did anybody realise that he had been working for British Intelligence and the Royal Ulster Constabulary Special Branch for more than 20 years. That a man as trusted and apparently committed to the republican cause as Mr Donaldson could have been spying for the British for so many years posed the pertinent question: “If Denis, then who else?” Mr Donaldson was an East Belfast Catholic who joined the IRA as a teenager. He served a prison sentence for bombing a distillery and forged a close alliance with Mr Adams’s “kitchen cabinet”, a team who went on to reshape the Provisional IRA into the most lethal and efficient terrorist organisation in Western Europe.

British spy Denis Donaldson was warned by police in the Irish Republic his life was in danger weeks before he was murdered, it has emerged. Even though the 56-year-old former Sinn Fein official believed he was safe living in an isolated, run down cottage in Co Donegal despite betraying his colleagues for more than 20 years, he was gunned down in a house belonging to his son-in-law Ciaran Kearney. As Gardai mounted one of the biggest operations seen in the county questioning motorists at roadblocks, they vowed to leave no stone unturned in hunting down the Belfast man's killers.