Loyalist paramilitaries were responsible for seven deaths and carried out 135 shootings in Northern Ireland in the last year, the British government revealed today.
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Orde accused the paramilitary groups of "crippling their own communities" |
The North's Security Minister, Ms Jane Kennedy, said they were also behind 41 bombing incidents involving devices which either exploded or were defused.
The number of casualties as a result of paramilitary-style shootings was 107 and the number from paramilitary style beatings was 110, she added.
The details, based on figures provided to her by the Police Service of Northern Ireland, cover the 12 months to the end of January.
They were given by the minister in a written Parliamentary answer to Liberal democrat MP Mike Hancock.
The Minister gave her answer on the same day PSNI Chief Constable Hugh Orde accused both the Provisional IRA and UDA of being behind many of the punishment beatings and shootings in the North.
He accused the paramilitary groups of "crippling their own communities" and said that the beatings did not even achieve their purported goal of preventing anti-social behaviour in the community.
This meant, he said, that they had not met the requirement of the Belfast Agreement that all paramilitary activity should stop. Mr Orde said: "The UDA and the Provisional IRA, in my view and on my judgment, are responsible for a large number of the punishment beatings and shootings that go on.
"Paragraph 13 of the joint agreement is absolutely clear. It says all paramilitary activity must stop, and at the moment what I am saying is, it hasn't."
He stressed that it was not for him to say whether or not a paramilitary group had breached its ceasefire, that was for the judgment of politicians.