Soldiers Fire Plastic Bullets at Ulster Rally; 4 Injured

BELFAST, Northern Ireland —  British soldiers fired plastic bullets into a crowd of demonstrators Sunday, wounding four youths who took to the streets on the eighth anniversary of the death of an Irish Republican Army hunger-striker, police said.

Authorities also said back-to-back bomb attacks over the weekend--one of them by the outlawed IRA--injured nine British soldiers.

On Sunday, paratroopers shot and wounded four youths who were among a group of West Belfast demonstrators marking the anniversary of Bobby Sands, a Republican who died May 7, 1981, after a 66-day hunger strike in the Maze prison near Belfast.

Police said they were investigating claims that paratroopers fired without provocation.

Sands was elected to Parliament for Fermanagh-South Tyrone during his fast. Nine other hunger strikers died shortly after Sands and before the IRA dropped a demand that its incarcerated members be granted the status of prisoners of war.

Also Sunday, a bomb exploded at Camlough, 12 miles north of the border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic, wounding four soldiers who were part of a patrol that tripped the device hidden along the roadside.

Late Saturday, five members of a foot patrol searching for bombs in County Armagh were wounded, one seriously, when a bomb was detonated by remote control in a house near Crossmaglen.

The IRA claimed responsibility for Saturday’s attack in a statement but made no mention of Sunday’s explosion.