200 Catholic Youths Rampage in Ulster After Protestant Parade

LONDONDERRY, Northern Ireland â€”  About 200 Roman Catholic youths went on a rampage here Saturday shortly after 15,000 Protestants marched through the city in the annual commemoration of a Protestant victory over Catholics nearly 300 years ago.

Angered by the parade through their neighborhood, the youths hurled gasoline bombs at British troops, who responded with a hail of rubber bullets.

Authorities had erected portable, 10-foot-high screens on roads leading into the Catholic district of Bogside in an effort to prevent clashes between Catholics and the Protestant marchers in the annual “Apprentice Boys� parade, which commemorated a Protestant victory over the Roman Catholic forces of King James II in 1689.

Hundreds of police and British troops also were sent to the area to prevent clashes. But shortly after the march ended, about 200 Catholic teen-agers, their faces masked by black woolen hoods, threw more than 100 gasoline bombs at police, who were backed by about 24 British soldiers.

After a two-hour confrontation, the British troops moved in, firing more than 20 rubber bullets as they charged forward behind six Land Rovers. Rubber bullets are designed to stun but not injure.

As helicopters hovered overhead, the troops were showered with rocks, bottles and concrete slabs thrown from tenement buildings in the rundown neighborhood.

Skirmishing continued late into the night, but there were no reports of injuries, a police spokesman said.

The violence flared less than an hour after the tense march by Protestant loyalists, angered by an Irish Republican Army funeral Friday and rumors of a new deal between Britain and Ireland over the future of Northern Ireland.

The Protestants were also still fuming over the appearance at the funeral of Martin Galvin, a New York City attorney and the publicity director of the Irish Northern Aid Committee, or NORAID, an American fund-raising group suspected of financing the banned IRA, which is waging a terror campaign to wrest control of Northern Ireland from Britain.