Prison man shot in front of family

Press, 8 March 1984, Page 11

Prison man shot in front of family

NZPA-AP Belfast Irish Republican Army gunmen had shot and killed a deputy governor of the Maze prison outside his Belfast home yesterday in front of his wife and daughter, aged three, the police said.

Two gunmen had approached William McConnell on foot and fired several shots from point-blank range as he came out ol his house accompanied by his wife and child, a police spokesman said. The. _ gunmen, and a woman had, invaded a ,house

on a side-street near Mr McConnell’s home the night before and held an elderly couple hostage. When Mr McConnell appeared at 8 a.m. the two men had run across the road and fired shots at him, killing him instantly, the spokesman said. They had made off in a car owned by the couple. The Irish Republican Army claimed responsibility for the killing in a statement to Belfast news organisations, and said that it should serve as a salutary lesson to Maze officials. Mr McConnell, who

officials said was in his mid-30s, was one of several deputy governors at the Maze, a sprawling prison outside Belfast where many top guerrilla suspects from feuding Catholic and Protestant extremist groups are jailed. The Maze was the scene of a hunger strike in 1981 in which 10 Catholic guerrillas died in an unsuccessful bid to be accorded special treatment as political prisoners. Prison guards said that Mr McConnell , had been in charge of the labour allocation board,, which ' assigned

work to inmates. The I.R.A. statement said that Mr McConnell had, “organised and directed beatings in the jail and . . . was selected by the administration to break Republican opposition to the allocation of menial and degrading work tasks.” Guards said that Mr McConnell had been responsible for assigning Brendan McFarlane, the I.R.A. commander in the Maze, to the job as orderly from which he planned and executed last year’s mass prison escape. Thirty-eight

convicts made a break on September 15, and 19 remain at large. Since 1976 22 members of the prison staff in Northern Ireland have been killed by the I.R.A. Protestant loyalists have also attacked prison officers. One was killed and another seriously injured in Belfast ambushes in a single day in December, 1980.

Mr McConnell was the 2354th victim of Northern Ireland fighting since Pro-testant-Catholic violence flared in 1969, and the twelfth to die this year.