Gunmen Kill Relative of Sinn Fein Leader

Gunmen killed a relative of Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams outside a nightclub early Sunday, marring peace negotiations on Northern Ireland’s future that are to resume today.

The Loyalist Volunteer Force, a Protestant gang trying to wreck cease-fires by the main pro-British Protestant paramilitary groups and the Roman Catholic-based IRA, claimed responsibility.

Terry Enwright, 28, who was married to Adams’ niece, was shot and killed outside the Space nightclub in downtown Belfast around midnight. He was a bouncer at the club in the provincial capital.

Enwright was the third Catholic whose slaying the Loyalist Volunteers have claimed since Dec. 27, when their leader was shot to death in jail by members of the Irish National Liberation Army, a splinter group of the Irish Republican Army.

“The Loyalist Volunteer Force is not against peace, but not peace at any price,” the outlawed group said in a statement issued to local media.

Adams, who was shot five times by Protestant extremists in 1984, comforted his niece, Deirdre Enwright, and her two young children Sunday at their home in Catholic west Belfast, where Enwright was a community youth worker.

The Sinn Fein leader’s press aide, Richard McAuley, said few people would have known of the Enwright-Adams connection, and the gunmen appeared to have fired shots at all the nightclub’s bouncers. Sinn Fein is the political arm of the IRA.

Besides killing Catholics at random, the Loyalist Volunteers seek to undermine Protestant politicians in the peace talks.

One Protestant group, the Progressive Unionist Party, has been participating in the Belfast negotiations since they began in June 1996, and it was expected to decide Sunday whether to show up again for negotiations today.

On Friday, Northern Ireland Secretary Marjorie “Mo” Mowlam made an unprecedented visit to the Maze top-security prison--where the Loyalist Volunteers’ leader was gunned down last month--and persuaded Protestant convicts to maintain support for the talks.