Top Issue 1-2024

6 February 2012

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Sectarian attackers leave Catholic youth for dead

LOYALIST MOB CHASES TEEN THROUGH HOUSE AFTER FILM CREW CAR SMASHED UP

18-year-old James Turley was working as an extra on the film ‘The Good Man’ when he was attacked

» BY PEADAR WHELAN

JAMES TURLEY thought he would die at the hands of the sectarian gang that attacked him as he worked as a film extra in the loyalist Village area of South Belfast.

The 18-year-old Catholic was chased through the loyalist enclave on Friday 6 January, savagely beaten and dumped in a wheelie-bin.

His attackers left him for dead.

The nightmare began for the trainee chef when he and a number of other Catholic teenagers, working as film extras, were targeted by a 25-strong loyalist gang.

The gang gathered near Frenchpark Street and Ebor Street, where scenes for a film, ‘The Good Man’, were being shot. The onlookers began hurling sectarian abuse at the youths, who are mostly from the nationalist Short Strand area.

As the film crew started to pack up, the loyalists moved closer, surrounding the film crew and the extras. They then started to smash up a car being driven by one of the production team as he tried to ferry the youths to safety. The mob broke windows in the vehicle and forced the youths out.

According to James, he and his friends scattered in an attempt to escape the gang but that he became separated from the others.

“I ran into a house,” he said. He pleaded: “Please help me. They’re going to kill me.” James then heard someone shouting, ‘There’s a Taig in there!’. The gang ran into the house and started beating him as he was in the back of the house, trying to escape.

“They were stamping on my head,” he recalled later, and they dragged him out into the alley.

“They just started beating me again. They put me into a wheelie-bin and were pushing me somewhere. I didn’t know where I was going. I think they realised they couldn’t beat me when I was in the bin so they pushed it over and dragged me out of it.” James lost consciousness and when he started to come around he heard one of the gang saying that he thought James was dead.

“I heard him saying, ‘That’s enough — I think he’s dead’.”

At this point, the loyalists ran off.

James made a run for it as soon as the gang scattered and flagged down a passing motorist, who drove him straight to the Royal Victoria Hospital where he was treated for his injuries.

It took the PSNI three days to release details of the attack, raising fears that they were not treating it seriously or were even covering up the sectarian nature of the incident.

The PSNI was aware of the incident, which occurred at 4pm on Friday 6 January, yet it wasn’t until the PSNI Press Office was contacted by the media, on Monday afternoon, that they released details of the attack.

The attack on James Turley was reminiscent of the killing of 31-year-old Margaret Wright in April 1994.

A Protestant from west Belfast, she was beaten and then shot dead in a loyalist band hall that doubled up as a drinking den in Meridi Street, off the Donegall Road, close to where James was attacked.

Wright had gone to the drinking den with a woman she met after a night out on Belfast’s so-called ‘Golden Mile’. The hall was used by The Pride of the Village loyalist flute band, which had links to the Red Hand Commando and the Ulster Volunteer Force.

At the band hall, a number of men, believing her to be a Catholic, took her into a side room to interrogate her. She was beaten with pool cues and brush shafts before being shot four times in the head.

The loyalists dumped her body in a wheelie bin, which they abandoned behind a derelict house off Donegall Avenue.

In response to public outrage at the Wright killing, the UVF executed two of its own members, Ian Hamilton and Billy Elliot, who they say shot her dead.

 

PSNI hold back

THIS IS NOT the first time the PSNI or its predecessor, the RUC, has been accused of playing down or indeed covering up sectarian attacks.

In July last year, a number of players from a soccer team based in Ardoyne in north Belfast were seriously injured when they were set upon by a mob of loyalists yet it wasn’t until reporters enquired about the casualties that the PSNI disclosed information about the incident.

In the hours after the fatal attack on Portadown man Robert Hamill by a loyalist gang in April 1997, the then RUC issued statements in which they misled the media. They described the incident in which Robert and his three companions were assaulted as ‘clashes between rival factions’.

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