Belfast kidnapping

Press, 19 November 1982, Page 8

Belfast kidnapping

NZPA Belfast Three masked men yesterday kidnapped Patrick Gilmore, father of a police informer, from his home in Londonderry. Mr Gilmore’s daughter, Dympna, aged 25, who was with him when he was kidnapped, said that the family believed the kidnappers wanted to force her brother, Raymond, to retract his evidence against people charged with terrorist offences and due to appear in court. About 30 people were arrested after allegations that Raymond Gilmore had given information to the police. Soon afterwards his wife disappeared, and it was asserted that she was in protective custody with her husband.

The Irish Republican Army said yesterday that its

guerrillas had shot dead a Protestant, Lennie Murphy, in Belfast accusing him of committing at least 20 murders. The I.R.A. said it ordered the killing of Murphy, who was 28. and the reputed former head of a defunct Protestant gang known as the Shankill Butchers, because he was trying to form another group to kill Catholics.

“Murphy had been responsible for the horrific murders of over 20 innocent nationalists (Catholics) in the Belfast area and of a number of Protestants,” the I.R.A. said. He died in a hail of bullets in north Belfast as he arrived in his car to visit a woman friend.

Although the police had referred to him in Court in 1979 as the leader of the gang — named after the

Protestant Shankill district of Belfast - they were never able to gather enough evidence to charge him. Eleven gang members were jailed for life for the torture and killing of 19 Catholics. The killing was the latest in an upsurge of violence in Northern Ireland and the Irish Catholic Primate, Cardinal Tomas O’Fiaich, appealed yesterday for an end to the bloodletting. Cardinal O’Fiaich, whose own archdiocese of Armagh has been the scene of 14 sectarian and guerrilla killings in the last month, urged the killers to end what he called the litany of death. “If my appeals for peace and reconciliation are not heeded, then at least the anguished cries of widows, fatherless children, and bereaved families must be listened to," he said.