Soldier killed in hit-and-run incident in North

Gardai in Co Monaghan were continuing to search last night for a tanker driver after the killing of a British soldier in a hit-and-run incident at a checkpoint in Co Armagh yesterday.

The RUC were treating the incident as murder, but Garda spokesmen said they were still treating it as a fatal traffic accident. The tanker was found abandoned near the Border in Co Monaghan but the man being sought was not at his home when gardai called.

The dead soldier was named as Cpl Gary Fenton (29), who was married with a 4-year-old daughter and lived in Newbury, Berkshire. He was on his third tour of duty in the North and was serving with the 1st Battalion of the Royal Gloucestershire, Berkshire and Wiltshire Regiment, based in south Armagh.

The incident happened at about 10.15 a.m. when a joint RUC and British army patrol stopped the Northern-registered tanker at a checkpoint near Crossmaglen. The driver was questioned for 20 minutes by the RUC, and it is believed the police had asked him to accompany them to the station in Crossmaglen when he drove off.

A British army spokesman said the vehicle was stopped by soldiers slightly further on but drove off a second time, fatally injuring Cpl Fenton, who had tried to flag him down. The army fired several rounds at the vehicle, but the driver escaped across the Border, abandoning the tanker about one mile from the incident at Longfield Cross.

Gardai were alerted by the RUC and found the tanker at about 10.45 a.m. They conducted house-to-house inquiries and later used a helicopter with heat-sensing cameras, as well as sniffer dogs on the ground, to comb the surrounding area, but the driver was not found.

The Garda later said it had no indication subversives were involved in the incident.

Officers from the Garda Technical Bureau were examining the tanker last night.

Gardai had covered the vehicle with plastic, but a garda at the scene said it had been hit from the rear by "seven or eight" bullets. The driver-side window was broken and a bullet appeared to have passed through the driver's seat, but there was no sign of blood.

The soldier's body lay on the road for several hours after the collision, as police carried out a forensic examination of the area. It was removed by helicopter yesterday evening.

Neither police nor army spokesmen could say what the driver was being questioned about before the incident. But the Northern Ireland Customs and Excise dampened local speculation that the tanker was suspected of involvement in smuggling.

A spokesman said: "Whilst there is a well publicised problem in relation to the smuggling of road fuels from the Republic of Ireland, Her Majesty's Customs and Excise had no specific operation in the Crossmaglen area today. We are not aware of a link to smuggling in the incident."

Petrol and diesel are considerably more expensive in Northern Ireland than the Republic, while home heating oil is much cheaper in the North. The tanker involved in yesterday's incident was empty when found.

The Northern customs spokesman said its officers had seized 10 tankers and 30 other vehicles involved in "oil fraud" so far this year. More than 300,000 litres of fuel have been confiscated and over 30 illegal retail sites closed in the operations, from which prosecutions are pending.