Policeman killed in hospital

Press, 2 June 1981, Page 8

Policeman killed in hospital

NZPA-Reuter Belfast A part-time policeman was shot dead inside a Belfast hospital yesterday. The underground Irish Republican Army “Provisionals” claimed two murders yesterday, that of the police constable in Belfast’s Royal Victorian and that of an Army bomb disposal expert with a booby-trapped car on a rural road near Newry. The deaths raised the known death toll to 2118 in almost 12 years. In a message to Belfast newspapers, the I.R.A. said it chnf fho nnnampd nnlicpman

as a direct challenge to the Prime Minister (Mrs Margaret Thatcher). "This is not the last card, Mrs Thatcher,” the messagesaid. Mrs Thatcher said last week that the I.R.A. could be playing its last card in its campaign against British rule through the hunger strikes for political prisoner status in Belfast’s Maze Prison. Onlookers in the Royal Victoria Hospital said that two men and a woman approached the constable who wa<; cfanriinpr at thA dnnr nf

the intensive care unit and opened fire at point-blank range, hitting him several times. The gang fled through the emergency ward, throwing down a gun as they' ran and leaving patients screaming in horror. The victim, who was guarding a man wanted for questioning, was the sixth person to be killed in hospitals. The other I.R.A. victim, Army Sergeant-Major Michael O’Neill, aged 34, father of two, was blown up as he examined an abandoned car. Sorrrpant-Mainr O’ftJnill

was the sixth British soldier killed in the Newry area within two weeks and the seventeenth bomb disposal man to die in the province since 1969, when killings began in the conflict between the minority Roman Catholics and majority Protestants. In Londonderry on Sunday three masked I.R.A. gunmen fired tribute volleys over the caskets of Charles Maguire, aged 21, and George Mcßrearty, aged 23, who were shot on Friday in a gun battle with an undercover soldier who was in civilian