BELFAST, March 13, (Reuter): A man was shot dead in a lonely Northern Ireland farmhouse today and four policemen were injured when Irish Nationalist guerrillas bombed a Belfast cemetery where a murdered policeman was being buried, police said.
The man was lured by phone to a county down farmhouse to deliver a load of firewood to a couple who were tied up by republican gunmen. He was the ninth victim of sectarian violence this year in the British province.
The outlawed Irish Republican Army (IRA) claimed they had killed a member of the part-time Ulster Defense Regiment but police denied this and said the IRA had shot the wrong man.
The IRA also claimed responsibility for planting a car bomb outside the Belfast cemetery where a police reservist was about to be buried.
The group said the attack was in retaliation for police harassing the funerals of Republican guerrillas.
“If they don’t stay away, we won’t give the police peace to bury their dead”, it said in a statement.
Nicholas Scott, Britain’s law and order minister in the province, said, “The IRA have plumbed new depths of depravity”.
It was the guerrilla group’s first car bomb attack on a cemetery in 18 years of violence in norther Ireland.
Article extracted from this publication >> March 20, 1987
