NORTHERN IRELAND: Indiscriminate Terror

Michael McGuigan, 19, a Catholic high school student, had a summer job at the Abercorn Bar in the center of Belfast. One night last month he invited a Protestant waitress for a drink, and then around 3 a.m. offered to take her home in a taxi. On his way back from the Protestant area in which she lived, the taxi was stopped by three men and Michael was taken “shaking from head to toe” to a nearby house. “For the next hour they kept asking me who was my commander, what was the number of my platoon, and so on,” he recalls. “I believe they mistook me for one of the Ardoyne district McGuigans, who are a big I.R.A. family.” The men took off his high-topped boots and hit him over the head with the heels until blood poured from his wounds, then stripped him to the waist and ran the barrels of their pistols up and down his spine.

Then McGuigan was taken to another house, where hooded men punched and beat him almost senseless. “I believe that you’re not in the I.R.A.,” one of them whispered to him, “but the others want you executed.” Amid curses of “You Fenian bastard,” he was blindfolded and led to an open field. “Before shooting, they lifted my hood so I could see them,” he says. “One of the men held an old revolver, the other one a pistol. Suddenly, I smelled nothing but gun smoke.” The yellow shirt he wore turned red with blood. He fell to the ground and tried to twist out of the way of the shots being pumped into his body. When he woke up later, he was alone in the field. Despite eight bullets in his legs, shoulder, intestines and groin, he managed to crawl to the roadside, where a passing motorist saw him and called an ambulance.

Michael McGuigan is now recovering in a Belfast hospital, one of the few survivors of a wave of terrorist murders that has caught Ulster in a grip of fear and fanned the flames of sectarian hatred. Often overshadowed by the more spectacular bombings and shoot-outs between soldiers and the I.R.A., the slayings are in a way more frightening because of their seemingly random nature. Police say that in most of the cases there is no apparent motive “other than the fact that the victim was a Protestant or a Catholic in the wrong place at the wrong time.” During what police now call the “mad month” of July, 37 bullet-riddled victims, some of them mutilated, others scarred and burned beyond recognition, were found in alleys or open fields. Twenty were Catholic, 17 Protestant.

Last week, after two more bodies had been found, British officials offered a $125,000 reward to reinforce the efforts of a special task force of 100 detectives assigned to track down the killers. Frank Wynn, 35, a Catholic from central Belfast, had been beaten before being shot through the head and his body dumped in a stolen car. In the grisliest slaying yet, Thomas Madden, 48, also a Catholic, who worked as a night watchman, was completely disfigured by more than 40 knife wounds. Whether in revenge or not, two unmasked gunmen later in the week walked into a Protestant bar and pumped a clip of automatic pistol bullets into the chest of Bartender William Spence, 32.

Police suspect that some of the slayings are ordered by kangaroo courts that are settling scores between the I.R.A.’s feuding Provisional and Marxist-lining Official wings. Others have almost certainly been carried out by extremists of the Protestant Ulster Defense Association. Catholics fear that U.D.A. assassins are seeking indiscriminate revenge against anyone who happens to be Catholic. Militant Ulster Vanguard Leader William Craig recently told an Orange Order rally that in retaliating against I.R.A. violence, “it will not be possible to choose between friend and foe in the Roman Catholic community.”

But the fact that almost as many Protestants as Catholics have been killed—and that few of the victims had any connection with extremist organizations—has now led to fears that a terrorist gang of assassins, possibly psychopaths with no political connections, may be at work. One gang in the Protestant area, says Paddy Devlin, an M.P. for the Falls Road area in Belfast, is led by a “mad, dangerous man who uses a knife on many of his victims.” The killers operate at night, mostly on weekends, often prowling in stolen cars or listening in on taxi radios, and apparently picking their victims by chance.

Men have been shot in doorways of their homes or found tied and gagged, with bullets through their heads, in the trunks of burnt-out cars. Most have been mutilated or tortured. David McGlenaghan, a mentally retarded youth of 15, was killed when gunmen invaded his home and shot him as he lay sleeping. Harry Russell, 23, a male nurse from Carrick-Fergus on the outskirts of Belfast, was found shot through the head in a back alley, covered with torture marks and stab wounds, including a T for “Traitor” burned into his skin.

The new violence, which took more lives than the bombings last month, has left Ulster residents benumbed. “I just wish somebody would teach me how to live again,” says Mrs. Malcolm Orr, “because I believe I have forgotten how.” The Orrs, a Protestant family, lost both their sons, aged 19 and 20, on the same night in July. Their bodies were found piled on top of each other near a road leading to the airport. The boys’ only possible crime was that one had a Catholic friend, the other a Catholic sweetheart.