Lucky to be alive
By Laura Friel
A North Belfast man who was stalked by loyalist killers at the
same location just twenty minutes before Brian Service was shot
dead has described himself as lucky to be alive. The 30 year old
single man was walking along Alliance Avenue just before midnight
on Friday 30 October . At the junction of Deerpark Road he became
aware of two men walking towards him, one on either side of the
road.
The Ardoyne man turned left at the upper part of the Deerpark
Road when he noticed the smaller of the two men, dressed in
black, was standing behind him. ``I thought I was going to get
mugged,'' he says. The man crossed the road to see if the man
dressed in black was following him. ``He stayed right behind me,
then suddenly the other man appeared in front of me from behind a
parked car.''
The second man was taller, skinny and dressed in a white top with
blue jeans. ``It was then that I saw that they both had their
faces covered,'' he says. Both men wore hats pulled down low over
their brows and scarves across the bridge of their noses. The
Ardoyne man, who was on his way to work, had walked up Alliance
Avenue to meet a work colleague. At that moment his friend drove
up in a car and the two masked men walked away into the loyalist
Deerpark area.
``I went on to work and thought nothing more about it,'' the man
says. When he returned home from work the area was cordoned off.
``The RUC told me someone had been shot dead,'' he says, ``I told
them I had been stalked by two masked loyalists just twenty
minutes before the shooting at the same place.'' RUC detectives
investigating the murder of Brian Service took the full details
of the incident. One CID officer told the Ardoyne man, ``you're
lucky to be alive.''
The statement describing the two masked loyalist gunmen was given
to the RUC shortly after 5am, within five hours of the murder of
Brian Service, yet a RUC spokesperson later described the motive
as ``unclear''.
In a third sectarian attack by loyalists on Friday night,
customers at the Farmers Inn, a Catholic owned bar on the
outskirts of West Belfast, scrambled to safety when loyalist
gunmen fired two shots from a semi automatic shot gun at the
pub's front windows. Fearing a rerun of the Greysteel attack, in
which loyalist gunmen shouted ``trick or treat'' before raking the
Rising Sun bar with gunfire, the 30 customers clambered over each
other in panic. A barman at the Inn said at first people thought
it was Halloween fire crackers until glasses and bottles began to
smash. The management of the Inn, situated along an isolated
country road, had been considering removing some of the security
precautions installed at the pub but he had decided to ``Err on
the side of caution''. The attack was later claimed by a loyalist
grouping calling itself the Red Hand Defenders, the same gang
which claimed the murder of Brian Service in North Belfast who
was shot dead just hours after the gun attack at the Farmers'
Inn.
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