2 Protestants Found Slain in N. Ireland

The badly beaten bodies of two Protestant men were found by a country roadside Saturday, the apparent victims of a feud between outlawed pro-British groups.

The slayings were the first political killings in Northern Ireland since December, when a senior member of the outlawed Ulster Volunteer Force was shot dead outside his home near the Protestant town of Portadown. Since then, police and politicians in the area have expected retaliation against the group responsible, the rival Loyalist Volunteer Force.

The feud has wider implications for Northern Ireland’s peace process. Both the UVF and LVF are supposed to be observing cease-fires. With each killing, the risk grows that both groups might widen their targets once again to include Roman Catholics.

Saturday’s victims were found outside Portadown’s southern suburb of Tandragee. A local Protestant politician, Paul Berry, said he knew both victims and believed that they had been abducted while walking home from a nightclub.

Police said the men had been so badly bludgeoned that it was not yet certain whether they had also been shot in the head, as local reports suggested.

Irish Foreign Minister Brian Cowen said the “horrific tragedy” should spur Northern Ireland’s politicians to resolve their current deadlock and resume sharing power in a Catholic-Protestant government.

Britain suspended the province’s four-party Cabinet this month and resumed direct control after the coalition’s major Protestant participant, the Ulster Unionist Party, threatened to withdraw because of the Irish Republican Army’s refusal to begin disarmament.

The Ulster Unionists had accepted a U.S.-brokered plan in November to form the coalition alongside the IRA-linked Sinn Fein party in expectation that the IRA would disarm.

The 1998 Good Friday peace accord called for the IRA and pro-British groups to scrap all of their weapons stocks by May.

But so far, the LVF is the only outlawed group to offer any weaponry to the province’s independent disarmament commission.

In Dublin, the Irish capital, Sinn Fein’s executive committee debated Saturday how to respond to Britain’s demand that the IRA finally spell out whether it intends to disarm. The party’s leaders said they would hold a special convention next Sunday in Dublin.