Belfast Tensions Flare After Teen Killing

Britain's Northern Ireland Secretary John Reid said Monday the province risked a return to the dark days of tit-for-tat killings after the first fatal sectarian shooting since January.

A Protestant gunman shot dead a 19-year-old Roman Catholic in the culmination of what police described as a ``catalogue of mayhem'' in north Belfast overnight which saw two other men -- one Protestant, the other Catholic -- wounded in shootings.

Gerard Lawlor was killed as he walked home alone from a Belfast pub, in a week when Northern Ireland's cross-community government already faces a stern test.

"Once again the violence of north Belfast has brought that part of the city to the brink of a return to the darkest days of random killings,'' Reid told reporters in Belfast.

He said that if the violence was not brought under control, the people of Northern Ireland ``will hand over the keys to their future ... to gunmen, crazed by bigotry and hatred, who will not let the peace work.''

Lawlor left behind a mother and four brothers, a girlfriend and small son — and a society wondering how to stop yearlong rioting on the capital's north side.

"We're going back to the way it was back in the early '70s. My parents told me all about it," said Rory Stewart, one of several disbelieving friends of the victim who gathered at the bouquet-covered street corner where he died. "He didn't deserve what came to him."

More than 550 of the 3,650 people slain in the past 34 years of conflict over Northern Ireland died in north Belfast.

However, despite a summer of street turmoil, Lawlor's was the first fatal shooting in Belfast since January, when Protestant extremists killed a Catholic postman. That slaying inspired large-scale demonstrations in support of the province's 1998 peace accord.

Police and politicians accused the Ulster Defense Association, an outlawed anti-Catholic group, of killing Lawlor and committing other attacks overnight on Catholics in north Belfast, where hostile British Protestant and Irish Catholic districts are often separated by high walls called "peace lines."

A group called the Red Hand Defenders — a label dismissed by police as a UDA cover name — claimed responsibility for all the attacks.

Before Lawlor was slain, a gunman shot a 30-year-old Catholic man in a leg. Before that, witnesses said a person in a motorcycle pointed a handgun at a Catholic man, but the weapon appeared to jam.

In north Belfast, Protestants insisted Catholic militants provoked the trouble. The first person shot Sunday night was a 19-year-old Protestant, Mark Blaney, who had been standing on a sidewalk when at least one bullet struck him in the groin.

That shooting came from the Catholic part of Ardoyne, a particularly dangerous sectarian flashpoint.

Sinn Fein, the Irish Republican Army-linked party, denied the IRA was responsible for the Blaney shooting. Police said the leading suspect was a smaller anti-British group, the Irish National Liberation Army, which declared a cease-fire in August 1998.

"Clearly, these cease-fires are a mockery. Guns are being used on all sides," said Nigel Dodds, the hard-line Protestant who represents north Belfast in British Parliament.

Dodds, from the uncompromising Democratic Unionist Party, is also a Cabinet minister in Northern Ireland's four-party government, a 2 1/2-year-old coalition that Dodds' party wants to shut down.

Protestant hostility to the power-sharing government lies at the heart of Northern Ireland's flaring political crisis. Mainstream Protestant politicians don't want paramilitary-linked parties from either side involved.

First Minister David Trimble, who leads the government as well as the Ulster Unionists, the major Protestant party, is demanding Britain make it possible to expel Sinn Fein from the government if the IRA is linked to renewed violence.

Currently, Trimble's only power — exercised in two previous political crises — is to withdraw his Ulster Unionist Party and force the suspension of the entire government. He warns this likely will happen again soon unless Britain toughens its policy on Sinn Fein.