Loyalist attacks

With the approach of the Orange 'marching season', loyalist gangs have attacked nationalist residents in Derry and Antrim.

A bus containing Lincoln Court footballers, based in the loyalist Waterside area of Derry, were returning from a match last Monday when they stopped on the top of the Glenshane Pass and defaced a hunger strike memorial. As a 74-year old nationalist resident, who lives near by, challenged the drunken thugs he was viciously beaten. The PSNI came on the scene and moved the loyalists away but they returned attacking a second nationalist family in their home, injuring a woman, her two sons and damaging a car.

All four nationalists were taken to hospital where they were treated for injuries.

In a series of separate attacks, also in County Derry, two Catholic homes and a Catholic owned hotel in the village of Garvagh were attacked in what Sinn Féin councillor Billy Leonard described as sectarian violence.

Meanwhile in the early hours of Monday 1 May two loyalists on a motorcycle pulled up outside the home of a Catholic family in Alder Park in Antrim town and threw a petrol bomb at the front window, causing scorch damage to the exterior.

Three adults and three young children who were inside at the time managed to escape.