Loyalist assassins pledge more killings after store worker shot dead

LOYALIST paramilitaries who assassinated a delivery driver outside a south Belfast shop have pledged to intensify their onslaught against rival terrorists, it was claimed last night.

Michael Green, 42, was ambushed yesterday as he arrived to open up the furniture store where he worked. The father-of- three was shot at least five times by two Ulster Volunteer Force gunmen.

He was the fourth man to be murdered since the organisation’s festering feud with the Loyalist Volunteer Force erupted into an all-out shooting war.

Yet sources close to the UVF, which has carried out all four killings, warned there will be no let up until its enemies are wiped out.

“They have to disappear, they have abused this society for too long,” one said.

Mr Green, a father of three from the Ballysillan district of north Belfast, was gunned down outside Gilpins Furniture Store on Sandy Row.

A colleague witnessed the attack but was too shocked to talk about what he had seen, a staff member said. Gilpins, where Mr Green worked for 12 years, did not open its Sandy Row branch after the shooting.

Northern Ireland Office Minister Lord Rooker described it as a callous and cold-blooded murder. He said: “This horrific murder bringing nothing but pain and grief to yet another family. There’s no place for gangsterism in the loyalist community or anywhere else.”

As well as the murders, hundreds of UVF men also laid siege to a housing estate in the east of the city in a bid to drive out families associated with the LVF. Police and soldiers stood by during the occupation.

Michael McGimpsey, a senior Ulster Unionist representative, claimed previous chief constables would not have allowed such a situation to develop.

But Detective Superintendent George Hamilton, the officer in charge of police attempts to halt the feud, insisted the force was doing all it could.

Alasdair McDonnell, the SDLP MP for south Belfast, also condemned the shooting.