Double Explosion At Irish Border Post

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32381, 21 August 1970, Page 11

Double Explosion At Irish Border Post

(N .Z.P.A.-Reuter—Copyright)

BELFAST, August 20. British Army security forces had a narrow escape early today, when a time-bomb exploded as they were searching through the rubble of a customs post blown up by saboteurs.

The security patrol had been called to investigate a blast at the customs post on the outskirts of Enniskillen, a few miles from the frontier with the Irish Republic.

As the soldiers began their walk in the wrecked building, a second time-bomb exploded, showering them with flying woodwork.

They were badly shocked, but ndt injured. “It was a nasty booby trap,” an Army spokesman said later. “The first bomb was merely to attract troops to the scene, and the second was meant to do the damage. It could have been disastrous.” Dublin Denial In Dublin, the man who claims to be chief of staff of the outlawed Irish Republican Army, denied categorically that his organisation was behind the spate of bomb outrages in Northern Ireland and London.

Mr Carl Goulding, a housepainter who has spent 15 years in British and Irish prisons

because of his I.R.A. activi-1 ties, said that he believed the Ulster Volunteer Force, an Illegal Northern Irish Protestant organisation, could be responsible for the bombings. < Two Ulster policemen were killed by a bomb blast on August 11, when they went to investigate a booby-trapped car hear the border with the republic. London Scare From London it is reported that the American Chase Manhattan Bank was the latest “victim” of the capital’s series of bomb scares. A branch of the bank in the City was vacated by the staff and clients after an anonymous telephone call, saying that a bomb had been planted there. A police search revealed nothing, and the staff returned to continue work after about half an hour.

Earlier, security guards had cleared a British Broadcasting Corporation recording studio in Central London after another anonymous call. Hundreds of young people were there to watch a pop music programme. No bomb was found.

In Manchester, a department

store was also cleared after a bomb threat.

The previous night more than 25,000 people were asked to leave a chain of London cinemas after a man had said that a bomb would explode in any one of 39 cinemas. The mother of Finnish au pair girl, Anna Korhonen, aged 17, who was seriously injured on Sunday when a bomb wrecked the car in which she and a young male companion were sitting outside a West End cinema, arrived in London from Helsinki last night The girl’s condition is described as “improving.”