The paramilitary campaign aimed at ending British rule in Northern Ireland claimed more than a thousand lives between 1969 and 1997.
(Transcript from World News Radio)
It included, notably, a mother of 10 children who was abducted, shot and buried by the Irish Republican Army.
37 year old Jean McConville was killed in December 1972 because the IRA believed she was an informer.
Now the man who became synonymous with the IRA, the Sinn Fein leader and former MP Gerry Adams, has been arrested over the killing.
But as Greg Dyett reports, he says he had nothing to do with the murder.
Before presenting himself to police in Belfast, Gerry Adams told the Irish broadcaster RTE he had no involvement and was being unfairly targeted.
"(It's been) a lengthy, malicious campaign against me. I will tell the PSNI (police) that I'm innocent totally of any part in the abduction, the killing or the burial of Jean McConville."
Jean McConville was one of Northern Ireland's so-called Disappeared -- the name given to the people abducted, murdered and secretly buried by the republicans.
She was killed after wrongly being accused of being an informer.
Former paramilitary members implicated Gerry Adams in the killing in taped interviews with researchers at Boston College in the United States.
Men such as Ivor Bell and Brendan Hughes were told the interviews would only be made public after their deaths.
But some of the interviews' content has become public after a series of court cases.
That recently led to the arrest of the now 77 year old Bell, a leader of the Provisional IRA in the 1970s.
He has been charged with aiding and abetting the murder.
Brendan Hughes, a former IRA commander who died in 2008, told the Boston College researchers Gerry Adams gave the orders to kill Jean McConville.
Here is part of his interview.
"A lot of this stuff that I'm saying here, I'm saying it in trust because I have a trust in you. And I have never, ever, ever admitted being a member of the IRA, never. I've just done it here ... I knew she was being executed. I knew that. I didn't know she was going to be buried, or 'disappeared' as they call them now."
Gerry Adams was confronted with the allegation in a BBC documentary aired last November.
(Interviewer:) "Brendan Hughes has alleged that there was only one man who gave the order for that woman, meaning Jean McConville, to be executed. That man is now the head of Sinn Fein. That's what Brendan Hughes has said. Did you give the order for the execution of Jean McConville?" (Adams:) No, I had no act or part to play in either the abduction, the killing or the burial of Jean McConville, or, indeed, any of these other individuals, and Brendan is telling lies."
The Northern Ireland Police Ombudsman found there was no evidence Jean McConville was an informer.
Her family has welcomed the arrest.
Her son Michael was 11 years old when his mother was killed.
He says the family never thought Gerry Adams would be arrested and is glad police are questioning him.
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