9 Die, 50 Hurt as IRA Bomb Hits Belfast Protestant Area : Ireland: Attackers claim targeted building was being used by outlawed Ulster Freedom Fighters.

Nine people were killed and more than 50 injured Saturday when the outlawed Irish Republican Army set off a bomb in the Protestant section of Belfast. It was the deadliest IRA attack in Northern Ireland in six years.

The IRA admitted responsibility, claiming that the targeted building was being used for a meeting of an outlawed Protestant paramilitary organization, the Ulster Freedom Fighters.

Northern Ireland’s security chiefs said they fear a swift retaliatory strike by Protestant militants against Ulster’s Catholics.

The Ulster Freedom Fighters warned that “the nationalist electorate would pay a heavy price.”

A man was shot in a Catholic bar in North Belfast two hours after the bombing, and police said it might have been a revenge attack.

Police said the bomb was hidden in a box that two men left in a fish shop shortly before the blast at 1 p.m., when the street was crowded with shoppers. An office above the shop had formerly been used by Protestant loyalists, who are fighting to keep Northern Ireland under British rule.

The bomb demolished the building, leaving many victims buried in rubble. Passersby, many weeping, dug with their hands to release the injured until heavy lifting gear arrived to shift the debris.

Two girls, about 8 and 13, and a baby were reported to be among the dead.

One survivor said: “There were people lying dead in the middle of the street. What did they do to deserve this?”

Prime Minister John Major, attending a Commonwealth meeting in Cyprus, described the bombing as “sheer bloody-minded evil--there is no other way to describe it.”

Northern Ireland Secretary Michael Ancram called the attack a “savage and barbarous incident.”

“It makes a total mockery of any talk of peace on the part of the Provisional IRA,” Ancram said.

He was referring to secret talks between John Hume, leader of the Social Democratic and Labor Party--a moderate, largely Catholic group--and Gerry Adams, president of the IRA’s political wing, Sinn Fein. The talks are aimed at ending the warfare in Ulster with a political solution.

The bombing was the bloodiest attack in the province since November, 1987, when the IRA killed 11 people at a war memorial service in the town of Enniskillen.