To spot the drug dealers in some parts of Northern Ireland, you don’t need to scour seedy street corners.

Your first clue might simply be someone walking with a limp.

For the past several years, the Republican Action Against Drugs, a local vigilante group also known as RAAD, has been working in Londonderry to rid the community of illegal drugs.

RAAD has been giving alleged drug dealers a simple choice: either they allow the shadowy group to “kneecap” them with a non-fatal gunshot wound, or they face a death sentence.

In February, Northern Ireland’s second-largest city received an idea how serious RAAD was in delivering its brand of justice.

Seven months earlier, in August 2011, an unemployed 24-year-old named Andy Allen was among six people named in a letter from RAAD that was discovered in a post box in Londonderry. For effect, two bullets were enclosed with the letter.

On Feb. 9, someone knocked on the kitchen door of the home Allen was renting in County Donegal. When Allen stood to answer the door, the former boxer and father of two was shot to death.

The mother of another alleged drug dealer described RAAD’s punishment in an interview with the BBC. The woman, who wasn’t named, took her son to the vigilante group.

“I shaked hands with him and said good luck and I let him walk on down the hall,” she said. “I knew how he was feeling. I knew how scared he was. I seen the men coming towards him. I turned my back. Then I heard the two shots. My heart just kind of went.”

The woman said she turned and saw her son, shot in the knee.

“He was white. He was just lying there. He says ‘Mommy, I’m OK.’ Then everybody started coming around. A man put a coat under his head. Someone put a cover over him.

“I know it’s bad and maybe some people will say how can I do what I did,” the woman told the BBC.

“I tried my best. My son is there, he’s alive. He got off lightly. It was something that had to be done to try to save him. It might have been brutal, but he’s not dead. He is alive.”

It’s unclear how many dealers have been given the ultimatum.

RAAD has shot at least 85 men over the past three years and forced more than 200 others to flee the city, the Guardian newspaper reported in May. The Northern Ireland Ambulance Service and a local hospital later said its own statistics showed 40 men had been shot in the paramilitary-style attacks in the Londonderry area since 2008.

In most cases, alleged drug dealers are being shot with small-calibre weapons, said John McPoland, an official with the ambulance service.

“In some cases, they are using shotguns, to inflict more pain,” he said, adding such shooting victims have been as young as 17 or 18.

In Londonderry, there have been five paramilitary shootings this year, including two in May, McPoland said.

For years this community of 230,000 has been beset by violence related to the fight for control of Northern Ireland by Catholic republicans and Protestant loyalists. A predominantly Catholic city, it was the site of an infamous demonstration in 1972 that saw 13 unarmed civilians shot during a Catholic demonstration, an event that became known as “Bloody Sunday.”

Michael Doherty, the head of the Peace and Reconciliation mediation group in Londonderry, said he helped 36 people like Andy Allen flee the city last year.

“It is outrageous that this situation exists and as a community we must all stand up against it,” Doherty told The Independent newspaper.

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But few of the men targeted by RAAD have been willing to speak publicly about their fears.

And on June 14, in a move that underscored RAAD’s reach, a judge asked journalists not to publish information about two Londonderry residents charged with drug offences.

“I am asking the press not to publish their addresses because I do not think those paramilitary thugs out there should have any more help than they already have,” judge Barney McElholm said, according to the Belfast Telegraph newspaper.

While the media complied with the request, local journalists have also helped to build up RAAD’s mystique.

The Strabane Chronicle newspaper, for instance, in 2009 published a photograph that purported to show a drug dealer handing himself and his drugs over to the group.

The picture showed the hooded dealer’s drug haul on the table next to guns and ammunition. RAAD, whose members were disguised by ski masks, said it handed the drugs over to a community worker and released the man unharmed. It issued a warning to 12 other alleged drug dealers in the area they promised to target.

“We’re trying to be careful not to blow this out of proportion because it’s pretty isolated to Derry and parts of western Strabane,” said Nigel McDonagh, the Chronicle’s editor.

“At the same time, RAAD has become like the mafia where people feel like the police can’t help them. There’s a big element of fear with their shootings by appointment,” he said. “What choice does a parent make — bring their kid in to be shot in both knees, or don’t and see them either shot in both knees, elbows and ankles, or killed?”

RAAD have accused its victims of selling cocaine, cannabis and mephedrone, a man-made chemical found in the street drug bath salts.

“The only way to alleviate this problem is to remove the dealers, those who peddle death within the community,” an unnamed RAAD spokesman said in an interview with the Derry Journal newspaper in 2009.

John Lindsay, a journalist who has written about RAAD’s rise in his book No Dope Here, said the group was formed around the end of 2008 by some former members of a splinter group of the Irish Republic Army, with some tacit support from a section of Sinn Fein, the IRA’s political wing.

Lindsay said RAAD leaders were aware the British state had largely turned a blind eye to a series of murders and kneecappings in the 1990s carried out by IRA members in Belfast who called themselves Direct Action Against Drugs. At the time, the British government declared those killings did not constitute a breach of the IRA ceasefire.

In addition to its shootings by appointment, RAAD has also detonated at least 17 pipe bombs in peoples’ homes, Lindsay said.

“There is a consensus that none of RAAD’s victims has been a major drug dealer who has grown rich from his crimes,” he said. “Most victims live in areas such as the Bogside and Creggan, which suffer from multiple deprivations, poverty and high unemployment rates.”