Protestant gang leader slain in Northern Ireland

The Irish Republican Army claimed responsibility for killing a Protestant gang leader in one of four slayings that raised the 1982 death toll to 72.

Lennie Murphy, one of the most feared of the Protestant hard-liners, was a leader of the Ulster Volunteer Force, a Protestant paramilitary group. The other victims of the shootings were two police reservists and a Roman Catholic shopkeeper. The incidents occurred while Northern Ireland Secretary James Prior was in the United States appealing to Americans to give money for reconstruction in Northern Ireland and not for guns.