INLA killer's funeral attracts 1,000

MORE than 1,000 people attended the funeral in Co Londonderry yesterday of Dominic 'Mad Dog' McGlinchey, the former Irish National Liberation Army chief.

McGlinchey, who once boasted that he had killed 30 people, was buried in the same grave as his wife Mary, shot dead seven years ago, and their daughter Marie, who died from meningitis.

Bernadette McAliskey - formerly Bernadette Devlin MP - helped carry his coffin from St Mary's Roman Catholic church at Bellaghy and spoke at the graveside. 'This was the finest republican of them all,' she said. She said he had never wanted to be a 'soldier' but added: 'This man never in the whole of his life dishonoured the cause he believed in.'

McGlinchey, 39, died last Thursday. He was dragged from a telephone box at Drogheda, Co Louth, in the Irish Republic, and shot at least 10 times in front of his son Dominic, 16.

Dominic, and his older brother Declan, 19, carried their father's coffin, accompanied briefly by Martin McGuinness, a leading member of Sinn Fein. At the funeral mass, Father Michael Flanagan said McGlinchey had died a 'hard and violent death. No one deserved to die like he did'. He added that McGlinchey had died with a prayer on his lips, and said: 'There is a little bit of good in the worst of us.'

In an interview given to a Dublin Sunday newspaper 12 days before his death, and published yesterday, McGlinchey said he knew killers had been stalking him since his release from Portlaoise prison 10 months ago. He claimed they were an Armagh-based family with whom he had feuded in the Eighties.

A Catholic grandmother underwent surgery last night after she was seriously injured in a booby-trap bomb explosion.

She had been babysitting two grandchildren in her home in Craigavon, Co Armagh, when she went out to her car and triggered the device. The bomb was in a traffic cone left beside the driver's door. When she moved it, the device detonated and inflicted serious eye, head, hand and leg injuries. The woman, in her 40s, underwent surgery in the Royal Victoria Hospital.

The loyalist Ulster Volunteer Force later admitted planting the bomb. It said she had not been their intended target and named a man they had been after. Nearly 50 homes were evacuated for several hours while army experts searched the area.

In Antrim yesterday another booby-trap bomb was defused in the garden of a house. Ten kilograms of explosives had been packed into a fire extinguisher.

The whole of Northern Ireland was on alert against IRA incendiary bomb attack yesterday after blazes in the early hours. An unexploded device was found by staff in a store in a west Belfast shopping centre during a closing- time search. Later, a restaurant in the city centre was gutted in a fire started by an incendiary bomb, and a blaze that destroyed a carpet shop a few streets away was believed to have been caused by a similar device.

(Photograph omitted)