15 January 1998 Edition

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Attacks continue in North Antrim

North Antrim nationalists are enraged that local loyalist Richard Hastings was given bail at Larne Magistrates Court despite being charged with attempting to murder members of a Glenarm family in a bomb attack on 17 December last.

They are also angry at the fact that Hastings' local Church Minister attended court and spoke for him and secured his bail. And Protestants, also angry at the minister's involvement, walked out of his service on Sunday week past.

It has also been disclosed that the McConachie family targeted by Hastings have removed their son from a local play-school as Hastings wife Joanna teaches there. The child has been receiving treatment since the incident just before Christmas.

According to Sinn Fein's Catherine O'Hagan, Hastings lost his hand when the bomb he had went off prematurely. ``This is the most serious attack carried out by loyalists in the general Larne area over the past year. Catholics have been targeted and their homes petrol bombed, numerous people beaten up and threatened with guns,'' she said.

The attack in Glenarm was directed at relatives of a Catholic man Gregory O'Neill who was acquitted in early December of the murder of a Protestant man, Kenneth Auld, in a fight over loyalist flags flying in Glenarm in 1996.

O'Hagan criticised Larne DUP councillor Jack McKee who called for a flagpole to be erected as a memorial to Auld yet did not condemn the attempted murder in Glenarm.

``Indeed,'' said O'Hagan, ``McKee said in a statement to a local paper, `I understand and share the feelings of the young loyalists of the Glenarm area over the brutal murder of a man whose life now seems to have amounted to nothing as far as the authorities are concerned'''.

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