Police in Northern Ireland investigating the murder of a former IRA commander in Belfast have released a 41-year-old man they had detained in connection to the killing.
Detectives, however, arrested a 27-year-old man in the city on Wednesday night.
The Police Service of Northern Ireland also carried out searches of properties as well as alleyways in the Markets area of central Belfast where Gerard “Jock” Davison was gunned down on Tuesday morning.
Davison was hit with seven bullets at the corner of Welsh Street and Upper Stanfield Street at around 9am.
The gunman, who eyewitnesses said was wearing a hooded jacket that concealed his face, escaped by running up an alleyway behind homes in Lower Stanfield Street.
A short time after the shooting, a number of senior republicans from across Belfast descended on the inner-city area to support Davison’s family and friends.
Davison ,47, is the most senior pro-peace-process republican to have been killed since the IRA ceasefire of 1997. Security sources said it was highly unlikely that any Ulster loyalist group was behind the murders, adding that the killers may instead have come from within the nationalist community, possibly from people who had a longstanding grudge against the victim.
On Tuesday afternoon, two senior PSNI detectives said they did not believe any of the hardline republican groups opposed to the peace process – the new IRA, the Continuity IRA or Óglaigh na hÉireann – had been responsible for the killing.
The 41-year-old arrested on Wednesday was detained after a property was earlier raided in the north of the city.
Davison was a senior member of the Provisional IRA in the city and later a supporter of Sinn Féin’s peace strategy. Lately he was also a community worker for the Markets Development Association.
A neighbouring community association in the loyalist/Protestant Donegall Pass area issued a statement on Tuesday afternoon condemning the killing and offering their deepest sympathy to his family.
Davison rose through the Provisional IRA’s ranks in the 1980s and later became its commanding officer in Belfast, as well sitting on the organisation’s general headquarters staff.
He was first jailed for paramilitary activities in the 80s and spent time in a young offenders’ centre for an IRA rocket attack on a police patrol in the Markets district.
Although a number of his former colleagues in the same PIRA unit later joined dissident republican organisations, Davison remained loyal to the Sinn Féin leadership and supported the party’s peace strategy.
