"Blasphemy"

Slaughter at Elim church

The Sunday service at Elim Pentecostal Church began uneventfully enough.

Eighty spirited voices rose above the organ, singing: "Have you been to Jesus for the cleansing power/ Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?" But before the worshipers had finished the first hymn, they heard a series of dull thuds. Suddenly, an elder of the church was staggering down the aisle, fatally wounded, and warning the congregation to take cover. As people dived under the benches, bullets began ripping through the thin wooden walls. When the siege was over, three churchgoers were dead and seven lay wounded. It was one of the more savage terrorist attacks in Northern Ireland's long and bloody history of sectarian violence.

Police now believe that an armed gang had driven up to the isolated church in rural Armagh County, just one mile from the border with the Irish Republic, and opened fire with pistols and automatic rifles. The killers escaped, presumably into the Irish Republic. Cartridges found on the scene link the killings to Dominic ("Mad Dog") McGlinchey, 29, a former member of the Irish Republican Army and still Ireland's most wanted terrorist. As police north and south of the Irish border went on major alert, Roman Catholics braced for a retaliatory attack by Protestant terrorists.

Charging that Britain had failed to impose adequate security measures, Northern Ireland's principal political party, the Official Unionists, quickly called for the resignation of Secretary of State for Northern Ireland James Prior. The Unionists also announced a boycott of Ulster's 78-seat Assembly. Established just a year ago, the Assembly is the cornerstone of British plans for a gradual return of power to a government composed of both Catholic and Protestant legislators.

Prior refused to resign and dismissed calls for greatly tougher security measures as either impractical or likely to hand the I.R.A. new propaganda weapons. Instead, he promised a modest redeployment of the 10,000 British troops in Northern Ireland, with more undercover antiterrorist patrols by police and the elite Special Air Service. In an attempt to lure the Unionists back into the Assembly, Prior also invited four of Northern Ireland's political parties to talks on security. Meanwhile, in a radio interview, the Prime Minister of the Irish Republic, Garret Fitzgerald, a Catholic, seemed close to tears as he denounced the murders at the Elim church as a "sacrilegious act of blasphemy." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.