Only the Home Secretary can grant a release to a prisoner sentenced to a whole life order, on compassionate grounds including great age or ill health. Only four prisoners known or believed to have been issued with a whole life order have so far been released from their sentences. Three of them were IRA members who were freed under the Good Friday Agreement in 1999, having spent more than 20 years in prison for terrorist offences including murder. The other was gang member Reggie Kray, who was freed from his life sentence in August 2000 after serving 32 years (two years after the expiry of his original 30-year minimum term) due to terminal cancer; although the Home Office never confirmed that he had been issued with a whole life order, his lengthy imprisonment and the fact that he was not paroled when his tariff expired (despite being well into his sixties) helped fuel media speculation that he was among the prisoners who had been issued with a whole life order. He died a few weeks after being freed.