Downey, from County Donegal, had been charged with the murders of four soldiers who died in the Hyde Park bomb in 1982, after his arrest at Gatwick airport last year.
We consider how radio is getting children's voices heard in Senegal and also take a look at 'witchcraft' in Tanzania and Mozambique, and the murders of suspected witches.
Yet, far from expressing wonder that an act as extreme and barbaric as the murders is what it takes for the west to show defiance towards a religious duty that is not meaningful to non-Muslims, cultural provocateurs successfully argue that this highly exceptional situation is in fact indicative of a general contempt for Islam.
Since we allowed this, over 14,000 offences have been successfully matched to over 8,000 suspects including over 100 murders and 100 rapes - and as far as I am aware, no one is on the database for dropping litter!
These murders, in effect reprisals against local Maoist guerrillas, who have also killed many, reached a bloody climax with the deaths of 58 men, women and children with no connection to extremism in the village of Lakshman Bathe in 1998.
The Association of Chief Police Officers claims that in the four years after the act became law in May 2001, the DNA samples of 8,500 people who were not convicted of an offence were later linked to 14,000 offences, including 114 murders and 116 rapes.
I think the figure revealed by ACC Drew Harris that 95 of the IRA's on the runs that got letters of comfort like John Downey are linked to 200 murders will cause outrange among many in Northern Ireland.
Facebook Twitter Google plus Share Share this post Facebook Twitter Google plus close 3.27pm BST15:27 My colleague Henry McDonald, the Guardian's Belfast correspondent, has sent me his snap reaction to the revelation about 95 "on-the-runs" being linked to 200 murders.
Although the man convicted of the murders is mentioned in the film, he is a long way from the focus of the story.
Around the random murders, the film hones in on Berlin's melancholy, a landscape of puddles and prostitutes, a silent city – the hush broken by bells or shrieks, the tap-tap of a tool being sharpened, and haunted by the killer's eerie whistling of Grieg's "In the Hall of The Mountain King".
For a start, murder rates are at their lowest for 25 years, and the proportion of murders that are family related (this includes killings by any family member, not just an intimate partner) are also down.
