February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
The bomb was spotted tied to the school gates an hour before the first children were due back in class for the new term. The road was sealed off and pupils were forced to take a half-mile detour.
British Army explosives experts removed the bomb, laid it on the ground and defused it without having to carry out a controlled explosion, which the students would have heard inside their classrooms.
About six hours after the bomb was found, the Red Hand Defenders, a cover name for the UDA, claimed responsibility.
“This is a frightening development,” Holy Cross School governor and Ardoyne parish priest Fr. Aidan Troy said. “We thought we had left all of this behind us.”
The bomb is a worrying sign that loyalists, in a bid to quell their increasingly bitter internal feud, may be turning their attention to attacking Catholics instead of each other.
Sinn Fein has repeatedly asked that Unionist political leaders take the initiative and mediate between the warring loyalist factions, but it appears that there is little enthusiasm at a leadership level for any hands-on role.
“I have no doubt that this attack is a cynical attempt by the UDA to draw attention away from the fact that they are involved in an internal feud,” Sinn Fein’s North Belfast assemblyman, Gerry Kelly, said. “We have, in recent days, seen Unionist politicians be highly outspoken in their calls for loyalist to end their feud. Unionists need to be as vocal in their calls for attacks upon nationalists to end.”
Three killings
There were three loyalist killings over the Christmas holidays. A Protestant man, David Cupples, was beaten by a gang in a loyalist area on Dec. 22 and died on Christmas Day. Police believe he was mistaken for a Catholic.
He was walking to work as a chef at the British Army base at Girdwood in North Belfast when he was set upon. Four men have been charged in connection with the slaying.
On Dec. 27, loyalists associated with renegade Johnny “Mad Dog” Adair, who was expelled from the UDA three months ago, shot the nephew of a rival loyalist dead in a kitchen in north Belfast.
Jonathan Stewart, 22, was killed after gunman, whose face was covered with a hood, forced his way into the victim’s sister’s house around 7:30 a.m. and opened fire. The killing was immediately linked to the two-month-long feud between members of the UDA.
Anne Darragh, the dead man’s mother, said: “He was not involved in anything. He didn’t do anything wrong. He was just an easy target for them to get at and that was it. They don’t care who they get.”
The third loyalist murder came Jan. 2. Roy Green was gunned down outside a notorious loyalist bar, the Kimberley Bar, in South Belfast by the mainstream UDA.
A UDA source accused the dead man of acting as a double agent in its bitter internal feud. In a statement issued after the killing, the UDA claimed Green, 32, told leaders he wanted Adair killed while secretly siding with him.
Green, a convicted drug dealer, was also blamed for passing on false information the led to the murder of Jonathan Stewart. A UDA said: “We regret the grief and sadness visited upon the Green family circle but treason is treason.”
White accused the five UDA brigadiers of plotting Green’s murder and has called on them to stand down. The UDA, however, claimed that senior members had been monitoring Green for weeks, saying he “had been acting as a double agent between the C Company and members of North and South Belfast UFF.”