Bomb blasts add to Britons’ worry

Press, Volume CXIII, Issue 33413, 20 December 1973, Page 1

Bomb blasts add to Britons’ worry

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter—Copyright

LONDON, December 19.

Britons now face the prospect of a Christmas marred not only by power black-outs and shortages of coal, petrol, and heating oil, but by terror-bombings by Irish political extremists: yesterday, four bomb blasts in London left 63 injured or shocked.

Fears that the explosions mark the beginning of a renewed terror campaign by guerrillas of the Provisional wing of the Irish Republican Army have been worsened by a statement issued in Dublin by the Provisionals, who for years have been waging war against British control of Northern Ireland.

“Pressure on the enemj will be maintained on a number of fronts over the Christmas period,” the I.R.A. statement said. The first blast yesterday, caused by about 801 b of explosives planted in a stolen

car, occurred outside the Home Office in Whitehall during the morning rushhour, leaving 52 victims injured by flying glass and debris. Last night there was a parcel-bomb explosion in a

nearby postal sorting office, and another car-bomb blew up outside Pentonville Prison, in North London. Eleven people were injured in these two explosions. Early today, a fourth bomb shattered a shopping centre in the Hampstead district, but no-one was injured. One theory detectives are working on is that the bombings mark the beginning of a revenge campaign for the imprisonment in England last month of nine I.R.A. Provisionals charged in connection with the two Central London car-bombings last March, in which more than 240 people were injured. Eight of those imprisoned, including two sisters, Dolours and Marian Price, were sentenced co life imprisonment, and the ninth to 15 years. The girls are on a hunger strike, and are being forcibly fed.

Imprisoned on criminal charges, they demand to be given political status and to be returned to Ulster to serve their sentences. The "Guardian” newspaper quotes an I.R.A. sympathiser in London as saying: "Yesterday’s bombings were a Christmas box for the girls.”