2 Arrested in N. Ireland Killings

Police arrested two Protestant militants Saturday after a Roman Catholic man was shot fatally through the head, in the second such sectarian killing last week in Northern Ireland.

Ciaran Heffron, a 22-year-old university student, was killed as he walked home alone after midnight from a pub in the town of Crumlin, 10 miles west of Belfast, the provincial capital. A taxi driver found his body dumped outside the town’s railway station.

On Friday, Catholics in the predominantly Protestant town of Portadown buried 29-year-old Adrian Lamph, fatally shot at his workplace Tuesday.

Both unclaimed killings are being blamed on pro-British Protestants opposed to the proposed peace accord for Northern Ireland, which was struck April 10 by eight parties and the British and Irish governments. It must be approved May 22 in referendums in both parts of Ireland.

The Crumlin slaying came hours after about 1,200 Protestant die-hards rallied in the nearby town of Antrim against the accord, which they fear will lead to the eventual demise of Northern Ireland as a Protestant-majority state.

Representatives of the north’s biggest Protestant paramilitary group, the Ulster Defense Assn., emphasized their support for the agreement at their annual conference Saturday.

The UDA’s Ulster Democratic Party gathered east of Belfast at the La Mon House Hotel, scene of one of the Irish Republican Army’s worst atrocities--a gasoline-bomb explosion in 1978 that burned 12 Protestants to death.

Ulster Democrats Chairman David Adams warned party activists that Northern Ireland could suffer violence of “a scale and intensity not seen here before” if Protestants reject the deal in the referendum.

The UDA’s six-member command on Friday lauded the agreement as likely to strengthen Northern Ireland’s 77-year-old union with Britain. The UDA is responsible for having slain several hundred Catholics since the early 1970s, but it has maintained a truce since October 1994.

Also Saturday, the London office of British Prime Minister Tony Blair confirmed that he will meet there Monday with Gerry Adams, leader of the IRA’s political wing, Sinn Fein.

It will be their fourth meeting in Blair’s Downing Street residence since the IRA cease-fire of July 1997, but the first since Sinn Fein helped negotiate the Belfast accord.

Fearful of a damaging split, Sinn Fein leaders have shied away from endorsing the agreement until they can demonstrate approval from their party grass roots. Many are disappointed that the deal seeks to reform, rather than abolish, Northern Ireland.