2 Killed in N. Ireland; Mourners Bury Dead From IRA Bomb Attack

BELFAST, Northern Ireland — Protestants shot dead two workers Tuesday, and eyewitnesses said a soldier wounded a Catholic man, as Northern Ireland’s violence escalated amid the grief of mourners burying their dead from an IRA bomb.

Extremists who had vowed to avenge the deaths of nine Protestants killed in Saturday’s Irish Republican Army bomb blast gunned down two refuse workers and wounded five others in a Catholic enclave of Belfast.

“It was total carnage. I have never seen anything like it,” City Council worker John McGeogh said as fears soared in the province’s capital that more bloodletting would follow.

Tension mounted with reports that the British army had been sucked into the violence when a soldier fired on a crowd gathered outside the home of 23-year-old Thomas Begley, who was killed by his own bomb when it exploded unexpectedly in the Protestant Shankill Road over the weekend.

Police said the soldier was being questioned about the incident. Eyewitnesses said he had fired from the back of a passing military vehicle, wounding one man in the stomach.

Several thousand Protestants lined the streets of Belfast for the funerals of a 7-year-old girl and her parents and another woman killed in the bombing of a Shankill Road fish shop.

That bomb sparked the latest wave of killings.