FROM THE ARCHIVES:The periodic upsurges in violence in the early 1990s saw increasingly random attacks, including the murder of four Catholic workmen at a house in Castlerock, Co Derry. It came within days of the deaths of two young boys killed by an IRA bomb in a shopping centre in Warrington. Gerry Moriarty reported. – JOE JOYCE
THE LOCAL SDLP councillor John Dallatt couldn’t understand how anyone could plot the killing of four innocent workmen. The motivation was bigoted hatred, he was sure, but how could anyone plan and then callously carry out such a deed?
Whatever about comprehending the mindset of the UDA gunmen, it was obvious at Castlerock yesterday that they had, indeed, coldly and calculatedly planned the murders.
The woman at whose house the killings took place recalled yesterday how one of the men, worried for his safety, asked her when the project started in November what sort of folk lived in Castlerock. “I told him, ‘we’re all very civilised around here’.” She paused and added: “I don’t think anyone from Castlerock was involved in this.”
The UDA killers had little difficulty in carrying out yesterday’s attack. They would have known the men were likely to be Catholics because the building firm for which they worked was based in the nationalist town of Maghera, Co Derry. Easy monitoring of their movements would have told the UDA killers that the men generally had a tea-break at about 9 a.m. before starting work.
Castlerock, according to locals, has never been affected by the Troubles so the gunmen were unlikely to be confronted by the RUC or British army. The workmen were soft targets.
A man at the scene said that at least two masked gunmen were involved. At first, after hearing the bursts of automatic gunfire, he thought it was the sound of somebody operating a jackhammer. But when he saw men lying dead, dying and injured, he quickly knew the North had been visited by another multiple paramilitary killing.
After the shooting, the UDA killers drove towards the village, did a U-turn, and then drove back past the scene of the killings. They abandoned and set fire to their Ford Transit van which was later found burnt out.
Yesterday afternoon people in Gortree Park were still shocked by the short, sharp and almost casual ferocity of the attack. At a security cordon tape near the scene of the shooting, a Catholic woman and two of her Protestant neighbours concurred that Castlerock was a village hitherto free of sectarian tensions.
All three said that the workmen were very friendly. One of the Protestant women described how she tried to comfort the man who survived the attack. “He was covered in blood, and was in a terrible state. He said he was never going to come to Castlerock again, and I told him not to be thinking like that. He said, ‘don’t tell the wife. She’s due to have a baby today’. I held his hand, and just tried to do my best for him.”
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