Sands an I.R.A. ‘hard man,’ say police

Press, 29 April 1981, Page 8

Sands an I.R.A. ‘hard man,’ say police

NZPA Belfast The convicted Irish Republican Army’ guerrilla, Bobby Sands, in the fifty-ninth day of a hunger strike “to the death,” has spent all but six months of the last eight years behind bars for terrorist crimes.

The 27-year-old Roman Catholic, elected from his prison cell on April 9 to the British Parliament for the Northern Ireland district of Fermanagh and South Tyrone, already has ensured that his name will become legend in .the I.R.A.’s long campaign to get the British out of Ireland. s .

He was put forward as a candidate for the vacant parliamentary seat to highlight his cause the granting of special ? privileges, amounting to political prisoner status, to jailed guerillas. Margaret Thatcher’s Government refuses to grant them.

Sands has said in statements from his prison hospital bed that he is “determined to die” for his beliefs. A Belfast native who left school in 1969, at the age of 15, Sands was sentenced to 14 years in prison in 1977 for "illegal possession of a revolver with intent to endanger life. He was one of six gunmen involved in a shootout with the police in South Belfast after a warehouse •bombing. Police Special Branch agents who work under cover against the I.R.A. say that Sands is “a hard man,” a dedicated terrorist who joined the I.R.A.’s Provisional wing when he was 18 to fight British rule and seek

unification of the province With the predominantly Roman Catholic Irish Republic to the south.

Sands, who is separated from his wife after having one child has shown a softer side to his character while behind bars. -

He has written poems and essays on life in the Hshaped cell blocks of the Maze Prison near Belfast where he has been starving himself since March 1. A booklet of his writings has become a best seller in Roman Catholic areas of Northern Ireland.

His supporters says Sands joined the Provos after Protestant extremists intimidated his family out of their home in Belfast’s Rathcoole district and later forced him at gunpoint to quit his job as

an apprentice craftsman at a bus manufacturing company. He was first arrested in October, 1972, after four hand-guns were found in the I.R.A. “safe house” in Belfast where he was hiding. The British were then giving convicted terrorists in Northern Ireland “special category” status and before his release from jail on April 13. 1976, Sands enjoyed the privileges he is now seeking to restore. The British abolished “special category” status in March, 1976.

Sands went underground after his release. He was arrested again on October 14. 1976, on the firearms offence and held until his trial at the Belfast City Commission Court on September 7, 1977. This time there was no special treatment in prison. Sands joined cell-block protests by hundreds of I.R.A. men demanding political status as soon as he went inside. He spent three years “on the blanket,” refusing to wear prison uniform, wash or use toilets. The protesters smeared their cells with their own excrement.

? Last year he became the Provo commander in the Maze and launched his hunger strike after the breakdown of a compromise that ended a mass 53-day fast by other prisoners in December. Now he appears determined to join the pantheon of at least 10 I.R.A. martyrs who have died on hunger strike in jail over the last 60 years, most recently Michael Gaughin after a 64-day fast in 1974 and Frank Stagg after 62 days in 1976.