Doctors expect Miss Devlin to survive shooting

Press, 20 January 1981, Page 8

Doctors expect Miss Devlin to survive shooting

NZPA Belfast The full horror of the gun attack on the former member of Parliament, Mrs Bemardette McAliskey (formerly Bernadette Devlin), was emerging yesterday. According to fnends, she tried to save hereelf by hiding under a bed at her isolated cottage near Coalisland, County Tyrone. At one stage during the early-morning murder attempt, her husband, Michael, who was also wounded, pretended to be dead. Yesterday the former MidUlster member of Parliament was still “very seriously ill in the intensive-care unit at the Roval Victoria Hospital in Belfast after three bullets were removed from her chest, hip and leg. She was wounded seven times. Doctors expect her to live. Mrs McAliskey, symbol of the civil-rights campaign by Northern Ireland’s 500,000 Roman Catholic minority in the late 19605, was quoted by hospital sources as saying, “I’m not dead yet and vowing to "fight on.” . Her schoolteacher husband is in the city’s Musgrave Park Hospital, where he is reported to be in a “serious condition,” but off the danger list. Detectives planned to interview him today. Friends said Mrs McAliskey, who is 33, tried to crawl under the bed, pulling the bed clothes on top of her, after her husband shouted a warning. Their three children, Roisin, aged nine, Deidre, aged

five, and Fintan, aged three, were in another room and escaped unhurt. Mr McAliskey, who is 35, was shot first, after he tried blocking the gunmen. But after they had fired through a side window, and smashed in a door with a sledge-hammer, one of the terrorists chased him into the kitchen. He shouted: "Don’t shoot, don’t shoot,” but he was hit in the back and arm. Friends said he collapsed and feigned death to try to save himself. Apparently a second gunman* — at least one was wearing a woollen mask — was also in the house and rushed into the couple’s bedroom, where Mra McAliskey lay terrified under the bed. She was spotted and shot in the chest, leg, and thigh. At one stage, while he was on the floor, Mr McAliskey tried to crawl to the telephone, unaware that the lines had been cut outside. The wounded couple were found almost immediately by four members of the Third Battalion, Parachute Regiment, who had been patrolling the republican area close to the shores of Lough Neah.

Soon afterwards they were airlifted by helicopter to a hospital in Belfast. Three men were detained near the house after the shooting, and three guns were recovered. The men were still being questioned by detectives at Gough barracks in Armagh.