Wave of rioting erupts after death of Sands

Press, 7 May 1981, Page 6

Wave of rioting erupts after death of Sands

NZPA-Reuter Belfast Thousands of Republican mourners yesterday filed past the open coffin of the Irish guerrilla, Bobby Sands, whose death by fasting has provoked a wave of rioting around the British-ruled province of Northern Ireland. The body of Sands, who died this week on the sixtysixth day of a hunger strike for political-prisoner status, was handed over to his family by prison authorities and was laid out “in state” in his west Belfast home. A policeman was hit in the arm in west Belfast yesterday when six shots were fired at a police van, the first time security forces had come under fire since the death of Sands, a convicted Irish Republican Army gunman. Twenty-two other people were injured in Belfast, four of them seriously, and at least 12 were arrested, a police spokesman said. Rioters hurled stones and petrol bombs at security forces in Belfast while a supermarket was bombed in Cabra, County Tyrone. In Dungannon, a number of vehicles were hijacked and set alight by a gang of youths. Troops were stoned in Newry when they tried to dismantle barricades. A statement by Sands’s

supporters said he would be buried with full Republican honours today at Milltown Cemetery where hundreds of Republican activists, heroes to the Irish nationalist movement, are biiried. Outside Sands’s modern terraced house a Republican official ushered in a steady stream of mourners paying their respects to Sands, who was elected to the British Parliament last month. The official said Sands's coffin was open and guarded by four uniformed I.R.A. volunteers. Sands was dressed in a white shroud and the coffin drapped in the orange, green, and white Irish tricolour, with his black I.R.A. beret and combat gloves on the top. He said that several thousand people had braved pouring rain, to go to the house. Thousands are expected at the ceremony. During the mourning, Sands’s . supporters have called for a clampdown on street violence in accordance, they say, with the hunger striker’s dying wishes. The hard-line Protestant leader, lan Paisley, declared he would stage a service in Belfast’s city centre today for “the many thousands of victims of I.R.A. violence.” In the Rouse of Commons,

the Prime Minister (Mrs Margaret Thatcher) declared that Britain would never grant jailed 1.R.A., men political status “no matter how much hunger striking there may be.” “He (Sands) chose to take his own life — a choice his organisation did not allow many of their innocent victims,” said Mrs Thatcher. . “To grant political status would be a licence to kill. That is why we will never grant political status, no matter how much hunger striking there may be.” The Labpur Opposition leader, Michael Foot, and several other members of Parliament backed Mrs Thatcher. Meanwhile, three other men. continued their hunger strike at the Maze Prison. One of- the three, Francis Hughes, aged 25, of Londonderry, “continues to deteriorate” in his fifty-second day., without .food, according to the Northern Ireland Office. Friends and supporters predicted that his death was only days away. Hughes, a convicted I.R.A. killer and once Northern Ireland’s most wanted man, was drifting in and out of consciousness and complaining of impaired vision, backaches, and headaches, they said.