Students escape grenade attack; tensions escalating

BELFAST, Northern Ireland -- Three Catholic university students escaped injury Monday after Protestant extremists lobbed a homemade grenade into their rented house.

The attack in the Village, a hard-line Protestant district of south Belfast, followed another night of Catholic-Protestant rioting on the north side, where Protestants damaged several Catholic homes and youths from both sides hurled stones at police.

Three officers were reported injured.

Also Sunday night, a 65-year-old Catholic man was hospitalized with head wounds after being struck, he said, by a Protestant wielding a meat cleaver a few streets from the latest rioting.

The attack recalled grisly memories of the Shankill Butchers, a 1970s Protestant gang that abducted and tortured Catholic pedestrians.

Monday's attackers broke the students' living room window with a brick, police said, then threw a homemade grenade packed with nails inside.

Three students were sleeping in the living room, three others upstairs. Though the room's walls were pocked with shrapnel, none of the students was injured.

The students, who didn't want to be identified, said they planned to move immediately. A joint statement from the two students unions in Northern Ireland and neighboring Republic of Ireland appealed to locals' economic interests as they called on Village residents to protest this intimidation.

"Local communities need students to help regenerate their micro-economies. Forcing them out will only lead to lower property prices, higher unemployment and fewer retail and other services," the unions' statement said.

Politicians on both sides warned that the spreading street violence was threatening to pull Northern Ireland back toward its darkest days after eight years of relative peace. But sectarian tensions have been rising since politicians achieved the Good Friday accord of 1998, which inspired the current coalition government of British Protestants and Irish Catholics.

In recent years, Catholic students at Queen's University have increasingly turned to renting apartments and houses in nearby impoverished Protestant districts.

These areas were long considered too risky for people with southern Irish accents or Irish-sounding first names, but the threat eased when the two major outlawed Protestant groups, the Ulster Defense Association and Ulster Volunteer Force, called a joint cease-fire in 1994. The Irish Republican Army also called a cease-fire that year.

Both Protestant groups' representatives are excluded from Northern Ireland's government and in the past few years have grown increasingly violent again. Protestant extremists, using cover names, last year posted leaflets in the Village warning Catholic students to get out of the area or face attack.