The people in south Belfast were sick and tired of drug dealers and the police who did nothing about them, so they took matters into their own hands: they tarred and feathered one of the bastards!
The police, however, classified the incidence as "a brutal and barbaric attack." Link
Rosi
The police thought that it was “a brutal and barbaric attack” because this sort of attack happened all the time at the height of the UVF and IRA’s power. Most of the time the victims of the vigilantes were not criminals but just people who had offended or got in the way of the terrorist groups. And no one even knows if this man actually dealt drugs or just happened to have a bad reputation. So a possibly innocent guy has been dragged off the street and covered in burning tar which stuck to his skin and possibly will not ever completely come off.
Call me old fashioned, but I prefer the method of fair trial and punishment.
DCer
I knew a refugee from Belfast who told me the IRA and the Protestants who are under age 50 are nothing but rival drug gangs. NOTHING except rival drug gangs. Sure, he said, the pensioners might have believed in a cause, but now it’s over drug turf and he moved out.
An American friend who worked there confirmed this is entirely accurate, but Irish-Americans over here are caught up in some mythical story that stopped existing in 1972.
interesting.
Zach
To: Rosi
Seconded.
And I’ll go one step further and say that even if the man had personally offered someone drugs directly in front of me… if the matter of him being labelled a drug dealer were 100% accurate… burning tar is “a brutal and barbaric attack.” It’s disgusting.
james h
Yes, it’s not so much a case of ‘people rising up against drug dealers’ but ‘one criminal gang handing out a particularly horrific assault against another criminal individual’.
Put me down for the old-fashioned methods as well please, before this site turns into an extension of the Daily Mail.
Libby
I was just about to post a very similar comment.
The various terrorist factions in NI are notorious for their activities – think of them as gangs, who also dabble in bombs and politics rather than guerilla fighters.
The victim may have been a drug dealer from a rival gang or he may just have tried to stand up to them (innocent people have been crippled, killed and disappeared for many years now). The vigilantes are very unlikely to have been innocents themselves.
Titus
Ok Alex, you’ve just lost a reader. Idiot. Promoting vigilante ‘justice’ by thugs…
Dan
You know, back in the ’70s, if you were caught dealing drugs to kids and sent to jail – you were a dead man.
Today teachers get kids hooked on drugs labeled by the FDA as Class 2 drugs (as are heroin and cocaine).
Call me an old-timer, but IF that guy was dealing, then he deserved what he got – no matter if it was simply from a rival gang.
Adam Stanhope
I think that the act of vigilantism is far worse than drug-dealing.
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