N. Irish Socialist leader is killed in Belfast attack

October 16, 1980

Gunmen killed the Protestant founder of the extreme leftist anti-British Irish Republican Socialist Party and a senior party member in West Belfast. The founder, Ronnie Bunting, was the second leader of the Socialist Party shot to death in recent months. Police say another hard-line Protestant faction may have ordered the killings, but Socialist sources claim British Army undercover agents killed him. Mr. Bunting, an arts student at Queen's University in Belfast, quit the Irish Republican Army in 1974 in protest over the terrorists' call for a temporary halt in voilence against British troops in Northern Ireland.