Gagarin’s Room

From the window of the ‘Gagarin House-Museum’ we see RUC men struggling to arrest a teenager on a Newry street. Later also I heard that the boy’s brother was being held at the time, as a suspected lookout for an IRA mortar bomb attack on the nearby Police Station that had killed 9 RUC men., which explains why they had it in for him, on the basis that his brother was involved… I suppose that’s the nature of a dirty war in a small divided society.

Sean Hillen writes: ‘I was getting a lift with my sister and her husband, when they stopped the car, recognising a teenager, being questioned by the RUC.
Not least given the historical hostility between the 90-something percent Catholic/Nationalist community in Newry and the 90-something percent Protestant RUC, it presumably seemed appropriate to act as a witness to events, which were becoming more tense by the second. Having been questioning him for quite a while, (they by now had his shoes and belt off, which they’d call searching and he’d call harassment) one of the two began to lead him away by his sleeve, when he tried to get out of it, so one policeman handed his carbine to the other (they would have had handguns as well, the other probably a Sten gun too), grabbed the boy by the hair, put his head under his arm and started to drag him away. Hot-headed by now, I tried to get out of the car, but luckily the child-locks were on, so I grabbed two frames through the windscreen, one of which is what you see through the window here.
Later I heard that the boy’s brother was being held at the time, as a suspected lookout for an IRA mortar bomb attack on the nearby Police Station that had killed 9 RUC men, which explains why they had it in for him, on the basis that his brother was involved.
You can see the original photo at seanhillen.com.