DUBLIN (AP) — British police and army agents planted inside Northern Ireland’s major Protestant gang played a pivotal role in assassinating a Belfast attorney, a former United Nations war crimes investigator concluded in a damning report published Wednesday into one of the most divisive slayings of the entire four-decade conflict.

Sir Desmond de Silva concluded in his approximately 800-page report that the 1989 killing of Pat Finucane probably would never have happened without key input from state agents within the Ulster Defence Association, the militant group that killed the 38-year-old Catholic lawyer in front of his wife and three children.