07-11-2005, 01:00 AM
James McIlwaine, a member of the U.D.R.’s Belfast city battalion from 1974 to 1977, was another militiaman who did not confine his anti-nationalist activities to his Regimental work. McIlwaine received an eight-year prison term in 1979 for his involvement with a loyalist group known as the ‘Shankill butchers’. Eight of these crazed sectarian killers got a total of42 life sentences for macabre torture slayings between November 1975 and February 1977. They were said to have killed at least 19 Catholics. often in the most hideous manner such as battering people to death or slowly strangling them in a specially-equipped torture chamber. Victims were usually finished off with meat cleaver or axes thus earning the group its title.
Collusion between the state’s counter-insurgency forces and loyalist death squads was also strongly implied in a pamphlet released by the U.D.A. and U.V.F. in 1979. This document said that of 142 ‘loyalist’ prisoners then serving terms in the special category status compound at Long Kesh, 73 were at one time or another members of the 'security forces’. These 73 convicted ‘loyalists’ were veterans, in other words, of the British army,
‘We really overstepped the bounds then,’ admits a Provo activist six years later. ‘The people were turning against us as they had never done before and we finally realized that other methods had to be found for dealing with criminals and for working out political differences.’ The IRA also concedes now, that the feud coincided perfectly with British efforts to depict the fighting in the North as a gangland murder spree. The criminalization strategy was advanced significantly as British propagandists pointed to the killings of young children and described the violence as a vendetta between two ‘crime families’.
Collusion between the state’s counter-insurgency forces and loyalist death squads was also strongly implied in a pamphlet released by the U.D.A. and U.V.F. in 1979. This document said that of 142 ‘loyalist’ prisoners then serving terms in the special category status compound at Long Kesh, 73 were at one time or another members of the 'security forces’. These 73 convicted ‘loyalists’ were veterans, in other words, of the British army,
‘We really overstepped the bounds then,’ admits a Provo activist six years later. ‘The people were turning against us as they had never done before and we finally realized that other methods had to be found for dealing with criminals and for working out political differences.’ The IRA also concedes now, that the feud coincided perfectly with British efforts to depict the fighting in the North as a gangland murder spree. The criminalization strategy was advanced significantly as British propagandists pointed to the killings of young children and described the violence as a vendetta between two ‘crime families’.