Teenage beating victim dismisses his attackers as `a bunch of cowards'

The 13-year-old victim of a paramilitary beating has described his suspected loyalist paramilitary attackers as cowards.

There has been widespread condemnation of the assault which the Northern Secretary, Dr Mo Mowlam, said was appalling. Ian Price, who turned 13 this month, suffered a broken elbow, four broken fingers and puncture wounds to his legs when he was beaten by four men with batons studded with nails in Newtownards, Co Down on Saturday.

The boy, from the Glen estate in Newtownards, told reporters the four masked men singled him out as he was playing with five other boys and four girls at the quarry at North Road in the town. The gang told him they were going to make an example of him, and forced his friends to watch the beating.

He said he wasn't scared during the attack. "They hit me with the batons. Then three of them went away, but the fourth just kept on hitting me," he added.

After the beating one of the men put a gun to his head and told him he had 24 hours to get out of Northern Ireland. "I'm not afraid of them. They are just a bunch of cowards when it takes four men to beat up a 13-year-old," the boy said yesterday.

His distressed mother, Grace, said while her son had been in some minor trouble in the past most people loved him.

"He may not be an angel but he has a good heart and he'd run a mile for anybody. "I could not believe that people could be so evil to do that to a 13-year-old-boy," added Ms Price. She said neither her son nor her family would be forced out of Northern Ireland.

"I am going nowhere. I am staying in the Glen estate."

Dr Mowlam said: "For a 13-year-old boy to go through what he did is just barbaric and appalling." She called on paramilitaries to stop such attacks, and added that they could clearly end such beatings if they so chose.

The North's Security Minister, Mr Adam Ingram, said it was impossible to comprehend what drove men to engage in such an assault. "These thugs have stooped to a new low," he added.

Mr Kieran McCarthy, an Alliance Assembly member, said he utterly condemned the "barbarous" attack on a "defenceless youngster. No child deserved the treatment that was meted out".

Ian Price was one of seven, and possibly eight, victims of so-called punishment attacks over the weekend.

Five men were beaten up by a masked gang who broke into a flat at Maralin Avenue, Lisburn, Co Antrim on Sunday night. The tenant was also told he had 24 hours to get out of the North.

In the nationalist Shantallow estate in Derry on Sunday night a masked gang wielding wooden clubs beat up a man in his 30s. He too was told to leave. In the early hours of yesterday morning a 17-year-old youth was assaulted at High Street in Antrim. He suffered severe head injuries in the beating. Police said it is yet to be established if he was a victim of a paramilitary attack.

The Workers' Party said the beatings were a reflection of the "paramilitary war lords trying to maintain their iron fist authority in areas where they see their power slipping away".