Enraged Mourners in N. Ireland Strip, Beat and Kill 2 Soldiers

Two British soldiers in civilian clothes were seized, stripped naked, beaten and shot to death on Saturday after their unmarked car was trapped in an IRA funeral procession in Roman Catholic West Belfast.

The Irish Republican Army claimed responsibility for the killings in a statement released to Belfast news media.

British army sources said the men, who were not immediately identified, appeared to have blundered into the procession. They were on duty but had not been assigned to watch the funeral, the sources said.

The soldiers apparently panicked when they were challenged by members of Sinn Fein, the legal political arm of the outlawed Irish Republican Army, who were supervising the funeral.

Witnesses said the soldiers’s car sped toward the mourners and stopped near the hearse. It then tried to back up, striking several people in the funeral party and scattering others, its path blocked by a taxi. Hundreds of angry men then converged on the car.

“They went bloody daft,” one witness said of the mourners’ reaction. “The sight was unbelievable. They were like animals.”

One man climbed onto the roof of the car and pounded it with an iron bar. The windows were smashed. A shot was heard, and there were shouts of “He’s got a gun!” followed by “We’ve got two Brits!” Witnesses said one of the soldiers fired a gun before being pulled from the car, but apparently did not hit anyone.

The army said that the two soldiers were in transit between two military locations and that it was normal for them to be armed, even when out of uniform.

“The two men were badly beaten,” a witness said. “They were stripped naked and spread-eagled and soaked in blood. They had deep gashes on the head where they had been beaten.”

The two bleeding soldiers were pulled to the top of a 12-foot-high wall around a soccer field for the crowd to see, witnesses said. Many cheered as the naked men were hoisted into view, but others, shocked by the grisly display, wept and trembled as the cortege resumed.

The soldiers were last seen alive being driven off in a taxi. Later, people with the cortege heard a burst of gunfire behind a building. The soldiers’ bullet-riddled bodies were found in a lot nearby. The crowd, apparently in search of weapons or explosives, tore the soldiers’ car apart with crowbars and other implements, then set it on fire.

There were reports that a priest who tried to give one of the victims mouth-to-mouth resuscitation after the shootings was chased away that that more shots were then fired into the bodies.

Early today, the army identifed the victims as corporals Derek Wood, 24, and David Howes, 23. It said both were members of the Royal Corps of Signals and were unmarried.

A British army spokesman had earlier denied that the soldiers belonged to the Special Air Services regiment whose men are believed to have ambushed three unarmed members of the IRA, Mairead Farrell, Danny McCann and Sean Savage, on March 6 in Gibraltar. The three were on a mission to plant a bomb in the British colony.

The Gibraltar deaths provoked rioting, bloodshed and funerals in Belfast during the past week in which five Catholics have died.

The soldiers were killed during the funeral of IRA member Kevin Brady, who was one of three people slain by a Protestant extremist, Michael Stone, in a gun and grenade attack at another IRA funeral Wednesday.

Brady, 30, had been among 10,000 mourners at the burial of the three members of the IRA bomb squad killed in Gibraltar.

On Saturday, a crowd of 2,000, following Brady’s coffin from St. Agnes Church to the same Milltown cemetery where he died, scattered in terror, fearing another Protestant attack, when the soldiers’ car sped toward them.

Northern Ireland police were preparing to charge Stone, 33, with the cemetery slaughter. They were also investigating him in connection with several other sectarian murders.

Army patrols and police--who had stayed away from the funeral to avoid the risk of confrontation and perhaps violence--sealed off the area where the corpses of the British soldiers lay.

Northern Ireland police described the latest killings as “an obscenity committed by depraved and perverted people.” The killings were also condemned by senior politicians in Britain and the Irish Republic.

Irish Prime Minister Charles Haughey appealed for “an end to this fearsome cycle of death and suffering.”

British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said the deaths were “an act of appalling savagery--there seems to be no depths to which these people will not sink.”

The lack of police and army presence at the Brady funeral was criticized by a Protestant leader, the Rev. Ian Paisley. He urged the resignation of Britain’s Northern Ireland secretary, Tom King, and Police Chief John Hermon, accusing them of bowing to pressure from Dublin in not deploying security forces.