February 15, 2011
By Staff Reporter
By Andrew Bushe
DUBLIN – The Loyalist Volunteer Force has declared “an unequivocal cease-fire,” effective at 4:30 p.m. last Friday.
The LVF, which is opposed to the Belfast Agreement, said it made the decision in “the hope that it would encourage people to vote no” in Friday’s referendum on the accord.
The statement was read by a masked man at a location somewhere in County Armagh. Five other LVF members were in the room, all of them wearing combat-style uniforms and armed with rifles and handguns.
Their statement said the cease-fire was being called to create a climate to enable the people of the North to make up their minds in relation to the referendum there.
The LVF spokesman called the agreement a sellout and said a yes vote would mean the union with Britain would be lost forever.
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It is not clear if the extreme group will return to its campaign of violence and end its cease-fire after the vote.
The group’s leader, Billy Wright, known as “King Rat,” was
assassinated late last year in the LVF H Block in the Maze Prison outside Belfast.