March 7, 2004 'They just kept telling me they were going to kill me.'
Henry McDonald, Ireland editor, The Observer

The target of the IRA's thwarted kidnapping says the Provos used gas to knock him unconscious.

Bobby Tohill, a former Irish National Liberation Army member, revealed last night that he had fought with his abductors for 10 minutes before they sprayed gas over his face to overpower him.

Tohill signed himself out of the Royal Victoria Hospital yesterday morning and is now on the run from the IRA. Despite a death threat against him, Tohill has named the Provisional IRA as being responsible for the attempted abduction on Friday evening.

'I was certain it was an IRA "nutting squad". If the police hadn't rammed the van I was in I would be dead today.'

He said the four masked men came into Kelly's Cellars bar in Belfast carrying US-style black police batons, with which they beat him with repeatedly.

'Every time they hit me with the batons I thought I had been shot because each blow sounded like a gunshot,' Tohill said.

The IRA have used such batons in the recent past to carry out 'punishment' attacks in areas such as Ballymurphy in west Belfast. Tohill, however, said this attack was a precursor to his murder.

'They kept telling they were going to kill me. They said they were going to take me across the border, torture me and execute me,' Tohill told the Irish tabloid the Sunday World.

He said the substance sprayed on his face was 'definitely gas and after a few seconds I started blacking out'. Later when Tohill woke up, he was surrounded by police who had just stopped and arrested the four-man gang.

The West Belfast dissident republican was taken to hospital for treatment and needed more than 100 stitches in his head. He discharged himself on Saturday morning.

Just before the attack, Tohill had been drinking in the bar with Geordie McCall, a dissident republican supporter who alleges that the IRA had also beaten him up this year, and the writer and former IRA prisoner Anthony McIntyre.

Earlier on the day, Tohill had voiced concerns about his personal safety in an interview with a west Belfast newspaper after his name and address appeared on a loyalist paramilitary website.

His friends had feared that he might be shot by the IRA and then dumped in a Protestant area where the UVF and UDA would get the blame for the murder.

Last night as he went into hiding, Tohill insisted that the IRA had knocked him out with gas so they could torture him at an interrogation centre in South Armagh and then shoot him dead.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004