February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
By Anne Cadwallader
BELFAST — As the always-contentious marching season in Northern Ireland approaches, and with a growing political crisis heightening tensions, loyalists have increased their attacks, particularly on isolated and vulnerable Catholic families, the GAA, and Sinn Fein members.
There are reports that all the main loyalist paramilitaries are planning to cooperate with splinter groups, such as the LVF, in coordinating attacks on Catholic families during the July marching season.
There are also reports that former members of the discredited UDR (a locally recruited British Army regiment, now renamed the Royal Irish Regiment) are training the UVF in the making of more sophisticated under-car booby trap bombs in readiness for July.
Meanwhile, a Portadown man detained in Britain for questioning about the 1999 murder of civil rights lawyer Rosemary Nelson, has been changed with one murder and six attempted murders, as well as explosives charges.
William James Fulton, who is 32, was charged with the murder of 59-year-old Elizabeth O’Neill, a Protestant woman who was married to a Catholic man, during the height of the Drumcree protests in June 1999.
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Fulton, who at one time faced drugs and weapons charges in California, now also faces six charges of attempted murder — four of them relating to police officers — and two charges of causing explosions, in 1998 and 1999.
O’Neill was watching TV when a brick was thrown through her living room window and a pipe bomb thrown inside. It is believed she tried to pick up the device to throw it out of the house when it exploded.
Nelson’s murder is being investigated by Colin Port, the deputy chief constable of Norfolk Police. She was killed in a car bomb outside her home in Lurgan, Co. Armagh.
In more recent loyalist attacks, a newly elected SDLP councilor in Larne, his mother and son were targeted by pipe bombers. Martin Wilson was awakened in the middle of the night by a large explosion that wrecked his fortified front door.
When the family fled across the road to his brother’s house, they found another pipe bomb on the front doorstep there. It did not explode. The street was evacuated, but Wilson has pledged not be intimidated into leaving his home.
Last weekend, loyalists placed a crude explosive device behind the goal line of a GAA pitch near Downpatrick in County Down. Sinn Fein assemblyman John Kelly, who lives in County Derry, was also alerted by the RUC to a claim that loyalists had boobytrapped party election posters in the county.
A petrol bomb attack on a house in south Belfast last Wednesday night caused burns to a 10-year-old girl. It was the second time the family home had been targeted in a year.
The mother and four children fled through the back door of the rented house near the Ormeau Road, but the girl sustained minor burns to her left hand. The Catholic family had been waiting for almost a year to be relocated following an earlier paint bomb attack.
A 13-year-old boy was assaulted and threatened by a gang of up to 12 loyalists in the Tullyalley area of Derry city last week. The boy’s mother, who wished to remain anonymous, said that her son and two of his friends were approached as they returned from a soccer match.
The gang attacked the boys and punched them, although two of them managed to escape. They then started screaming, "Are you a Fenian or a Prod?" at the one remaining boy, who by this time was terrified, the mother said.
Catholics living in the predominantly loyalist Clooney Estate in the Waterside area of Derry are planning to leave the area after the two latest attacks on families living there.