The recently-reactivated Orange Volunteers admitted yesterday's bombing at a Co Derry GAA club which injured a construction worker. The loyalist paramilitary organisation has claimed responsibility for a series of similar attacks since last October.
The man was working at the GAA club in Magherafelt at around midday yesterday. After lifting some breeze blocks he noticed a suspicious object.
The device exploded as he was running away. He was showered in a hail of stones, and was treated in hospital for minor injuries.
Last Tuesday the RUC, with club officials and workers, carried out a search of the premises and grounds after the Orange Volunteers warned that they had planted a bomb there. Nothing was found.
The Orange Volunteers in a statement yesterday said it had left an "anti-personnel device" at the club.
Over recent years GAA members have regularly been the target of loyalist paramilitaries. In May 1997 Mr Sean Brown from Bellaghy, near Magherafelt, was murdered by the Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF) outside the local club, of which he was chairman.
The Orange Volunteers has admitted several gun and bomb attacks in the past three months. Shortly before Christmas it said it was responsible for a gun attack on a south Derry nationalist and a bomb attack on a Catholic-owned pub near Aldergrove, Co Antrim.
The group also said it carried out attacks on Catholic-owned businesses in October, including a gun attack on a pub in west Belfast. No one was killed or injured in these incidents.
There is confusion over who is behind the Orange Volunteers. Some of the attacks which the group admitted were also claimed by a new organisation calling itself the Red Hand Defenders, which said it murdered Mr Brian Service, a Catholic, in Belfast in October.
It is unclear whether the two organisations are one and the same, or whether there is an overlap between the memberships.
Sinn Fein has claimed that the title is a flag of convenience for the Loyalist Volunteer Force or other loyalist paramilitaries purportedly on ceasefire, operating in the mid-Ulster and south Derry areas.
The Orange Volunteers was last in the news in the early to mid-1970s. In November it staged a show of strength for the media and threatened to murder freed IRA prisoners whom it described as "fair game" for killings.
Masked members of the organisation carrying weapons posed for photographs. They described themselves as "practising Protestants" and "defenders of the reformed faith".
One of their spokesmen said at the time: "Ordinary Catholics have nothing to fear from us. But the true enemies of Ulster will be targeted, and that's a lot wider than just Sinn Fein and the IRA."
Mr John Kelly, a Sinn Fein Assembly member from Magherafelt, said there had been a series of loyalist attacks on Catholics in south Derry recently. He warned that nationalists must be on their guard.
