Life Term Prompts Welsh Mine Strike
About 300 miners went on strike Friday to protest the imposition of a life sentence on a co-worker convicted of murdering a taxi driver taking a strike-breaker to work during a yearlong miners’ walkout.
A spokesman for the state-run National Coal Board said the men walked out from a colliery in south Wales where Russell Shankland, who was convicted Thursday of the murder, worked.
Shankland and another Welsh miner, Dean Hancock, were given life sentences for the murder of taxi driver David Wilkie. He was killed when a concrete block was dropped on his taxi last November as he drove a miner to work during the strike.
Members of the local mining community said they had expected the men to be convicted of manslaughter rather than murder.
The pit strike, called over planned mine closures, ended in March without a settlement after more and more union members had drifted back to work.
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