The shooting dead of a nine-year-old Belfast girl during an internal INLA feud was a totally indiscriminate act of murder, an RUC inspector told her Belfast inquest yesterday.
Barbara McAlorum, a pupil at Star of the Sea Primary School, was shot twice on March 15th last as she lay on the carpet in the front room of her home in Ashfield Gardens in north Belfast. She died in the farms of her father.
Eight shots were fired through the front window after several others had been fired through the front door of the house, wounding a man who was using the telephone in the hallway.
The RUC inspector said no organisation had claimed responsibility for the shooting, but the general headquarters staff of the INLA had issued a statement blaming "remnants of a breakaway Gallaher gang of bloodthirsty thugs for the murder."
The Belfast coroner, Mr James Leckey, called the shooting "wicked and random" and said it beggared belief that anyone could walk up to a house and fire into it without caring who he killed.
