Seven deaths, 135 shootings blamed on loyalists

LOYALISTS paramilitaries were responsible for seven deaths and 135 shootings in the North in the last year, the British Government revealed yesterday.

Security Minister Jane Kennedy said they were also behind 41 bombing incidents involving devices which either exploded or were defused.

The number of casualties of paramilitary style shootings was 107, and there were 110 casualties of paramilitary style beatings, she added.

The details, based on figures provided to her by the Police Service of Northern Ireland, cover the 12 months to the end of January, and were given by the minister in a written Parliamentary answer to Liberal Democrat MP Mike Hancock.

The minister gave her answer on the same day PSNI Chief Constable Hugh Orde accused both the Provisional IRA and UDA of being behind many of the punishment beatings and shootings in the province.

He accused the paramilitary groups of "crippling their own communities," and said the beatings did not even achieve their purported goal of preventing anti-social behaviour in the community.

This meant, he said, they had not met the requirement of the Good Friday Agreement that all paramilitary activity should stop.

"The UDA and the Provisional IRA, in my view, and in my judgement, are responsible for a large number of the punishment beatings and shootings that go on," said Mr Orde.

"Paragraph 13 of the joint agreement is absolutely clear. It says all paramilitary activity must stop, and at the moment what I am saying is, it hasn't."

He stressed that it was not for him to say whether or not a paramilitary group had breached its ceasefire, that was for the politicians to decide.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, he said that as well as being illegal, the punishment attacks were not even effective in the paramilitary groups' own terms.

"The harsh reality is they don't work," he said. "The vast majority of people injured by these attacks are not deterred, should they be committing anti-social behaviour.

"It doesn't work. These people are crippling their own communities. The vast majority of punishment shootings and beatings take place on individuals under 30 years of age."

The pattern of attacks had changed in recent times, with more beatings and less shootings, perhaps an indication that even the paramilitaries were recognising it didn't work, he said.

His officers, he revealed were working "incredibly hard" at the front end of policing to try to stamp out such attacks.

"They are in negotiations many times behind the scenes with these paramilitary groups to try to convince them that this doesn't work, it does not help their communities and it has to stop.

"We have to challenge communities' perceptions of these people and break the idea that they are role models.

"We have to target people we believe are responsible and arrest them in a way that we control the evidence," said Mr Orde.

"It is very hard because, for understandable reasons, many people in these communities are too frightened currently to give evidence against these people."