British soldier wounded in bomb attack

Press, 15 May 1981, Page 8

British soldier wounded in bomb attack

NZPA-Reuter Belfast A soldier was “very seriously ill” in hospital yesterday after being injured in’ a blast bomb attack in the republican Ardoyne district of Belfast: • • ' An Army spokesman said that the -attack came as a group of soldiers were on a routine foot patrol. The soldier, the only one injured in the attack, is thought to have been hit by the full force of the blast bomb and to have suffered severe chest injuries.

Earlier, the British authorities refused, to release the body of the Irish Republican Army hunger striker. Francis Hughes, for seven hours until his family agreed not to drive it through Roman Catholic west Belfast for a hero’s farewell Security chiefs feared that taking Hughes’s bod.v through the Andersontown and Falls Road districts would touch off more trouble in the area.

The police delayed releasing’ the body from the city morgue until Hughes’s family agreed to drive it in a hearse straight to their home in Bellaghy; 64km north-west of Belfast.

who was injured in rioting last week after the death of another hunger striker, Bobby Sands, died yesterday in a Belfast hospital. His 14-year-old son, Desmond, injured in the same violence, died on Saturday. Mr Guiney, aged 45, who died without regaining consciousness, was, the fifth person to be killed violently since Sands died.

Appeals for’British concessions to avert the death of a third hunger striker in Northern . Ireland were led yesterday by Cardinal Tomas O’Fiaich, the Catholic Primate of Ireland.

He sent a telegram to the British Prime Minister (Mrs Margaret Thatcher) after Hughes died.

“In God’s name don’t allow another death," he said. Two other members of the 1.R.A., fighting to unite the British province with the Irish Republic, yesterday were in the fifty-second day of a similar fast in the Maze prison. Republican spokesmen in Belfast said a fourth I.R.A. prisoner in the Maze, would join the fast today, replacing Hughes.