Violent tide engulfs North

VIOLENCE IN the North has surged since the Good Friday Agreement, a report claimed yesterday.

Paramilitary chiefs on both sides are continuing to order a savage campaign of shootings, beatings and bombings, the ceasefire study found.

The Independent Monitoring Commission, in a damning assessment, found murder rates approaching one a month.

The four-man watchdog, drawn from Britain, Ireland and the US, also backed PSNI Chief Constable Hugh Orde’s verdict that the IRA was behind the February abduction of dissident republican Bobby Tohill that sparked a political crisis in Belfast.

“The operation was one planned and undertaken by the Provisional IRA,” the study concluded.

The report said that even though the level of killing is swell down on the bloodiest days of the Troubles, shootings have been higher since the April 1998 Agreement.

The 1,119 attacks (721 loyalist and 398 republican) between 1999 and 2002 were nearly double the rate for 1991-94.

“Paramilitary activity as a whole is at a disturbingly high level, and violence short of murder is at a level which would cause outrage in the rest of the UK or in Ireland,” the report said.

Descriptions of the assaults as so-called punishment beatings, lending them “spurious respectability”, were rejected.

The study said there were 12 paramilitary killings since January 2003. Loyalists were responsible for at least eight, and only one was attributed to the Provisionals.

But the commission accused them of eight shootings this year, along with three abductions and an exiling in recent months.

It said this forms part of a pattern where IRA chiefs can order the attacks to stop at times such as elections.