Sunday, September 11, 2005 - 12:00 AM
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By Shawn Pogatschnik
The Associated Press
BELFAST, Northern Ireland — Protestant extremists threw homemade grenades yesterday and seven police and two civilians were wounded in the latest fury over a restricted Belfast parade.
Protestants clashed with police, British troops and Catholic crowds in several parts of Belfast after authorities blocked the Orange Order — the territory's major Protestant brotherhood — from parading past the hard-line Catholic end of disputed Springfield Road.
At least three officers were injured by flames and shrapnel from homemade grenades and gasoline-filled bottles on the nearby North Circular Road. Four other officers were injured in separate incidents across the city.
Two civilians also were injured.
Officers on the North Circular Road took cover behind their armored vehicles after hearing bursts of automatic gunfire, although nobody was reported hit by bullets.
Later, riot police equipped with body armor, shields and flame-retardant suits repelled the attackers with plastic bullets and water cannons.
The rioting continued for several hours, spreading after nightfall to Ballyclare and Newtownabbey, two predominantly Protestant suburbs of Belfast. On the Shankill Road, more than 1,000 people confronted police units, who responded with plastic-bullet volleys and water jets.
Protestant mobs also blocked several key roads to protest the authorities' decision to bar Orangemen from marching on most of the Springfield Road, a predominantly Catholic area with one isolated Protestant section. Police instead forced the Orangemen to march through a derelict industrial site to their Orange lodge, which overlooks the road.
Army engineers erected truck-mounted canvas screens in hopes of blocking Catholics' view of the parade. But several hundred Catholics gathered on the road, and some stood on their rooftops to observe the drum-thumping procession. Both sides shouted vulgar abuse at each other.