MEET THE pensioner killer who is back on the streets and is commuting from Mount joy Prison to his job as a mechanic.

This exclusive photograph shows Francis Palmer leaving the Dublin jail- as he does just after 7.30am every day.

The convicted killer then walks for 15 minutes to a housing estate where he collects his car, before driving to a garage in the Clondalkin area.

Palmer (42), originally from Foxborough Road, Lucan, was at the centre of one of the most brutal crimes of the 1990s, after he shot dead a pensioner during a raid on a home in Co. Tipperary.
Palrner was part of an armed gang that gunned down innocent cattle dealer,Danny Fanning (71), in front of his terrified wife at their home in 1995.

The savage crime lead to calls for a clampdown on Dublin gangs marauding around the countryside. Bizarrely, Palmer's name hit the headlines again in 2005 when it emerged his twin brother was dating pop queen Samantha Mumba,Former male stripper Gary Palmer dated the singer and was regularly photographed with her around Dublin.
A prison source said Francis Palmer commutes between Mount joy and Clondalkin every weekday.

The source told the Sunday World that Palmer is due for permanent release within weeks.
"He is due to get out permanently in the very near future but, until then, he is getting day release most days," he said.

In May 1997, Palmer was jailed for life following a tense trial. The court heard that a gang had targeted Mr Fanning after being told that on market days the elderly farmer often returned home with more than IR£60,000, which he kept in a safe. However, Danny had got rid of the safe when carrying out renovations and tended to avoid cash.

That day he had sold only IR£14,OOO worth of livestock and he had been paid by cheque. The four masked robbers spent an hour ransacking the house before fleeing with a wallet containing just IR£155 and "punishing" Danny by shooting him in the knee.
He bled to death before he could be taken to hospital. The court was told how two men wearing balaclavas and brandishing sawed-off shotguns had burst into the Danny s home and ordered him and his 65-year-old wife Biddy to lie on the floor.

The couple's youngest daughter Rose (26), was forced into the farmhouse by a third masked man wielding a baseball bat.

During the trial, the court heard how Palmer had admitted involvement during interviews with gardai.

Shotguns

He had said: "i was only the driver, I was not in the house."
Palmer had told gardai he had never touched any guns, but knew there was a baseball bat and a sawed-off shotgun.

"He wasn't meant to die;it was only meant to be a warning," he told gardai. After Palmer and a second man, Ivor Sweetman, were convicted, there were angry scenes outside the court from their relatives and friends.
Both Sweetman and Palmer had claimed that they were "fitted up" by gardai. Both made statements that they were involved in the robbery, but refused to sign them.Ivor Sweetman, from Jobstown in Tallaght, had his conviction for murder overturned on appeal in 2000.