How has the IRA changed? Once it shot you in the knees, now it's in the ha

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IoS investigation: The 'Padre Pio' is the grim nickname for the latest kind of rough justice being meted out by an IRA reluctant to give up its guns
By David McKittrick, Ireland Correspondent
06 February 2005


In Belfast's brutal backstreet humour, the IRA practice is known as a "Padre Pio" - an ironic reference to an Italian Catholic priest who had stigmata on his hands.

But there is nothing godly in this practice, for it refers to paramilitary gunmen carrying out "punishments" on their victims by shooting them through both hands. In a grisly trend, a wave of attacks has been carried out in recent weeks: the IRA, which has renounced violence, believes that such a promise refers only to attacks on the Army and the police.

The Padre Pio mutilation of hands is the latest in a long history of punishments inflicted by republican and loyalist organisations on those who have offended them.

Gunmen on both sides of the divide regularly use the technique after years in which unfortunates said to be guilty of "anti-social activities" have been kneecapped, beaten and sometimes shot in the elbows.

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/ulster/story.jsp?story=608215