Bloodstains in the streets, a furniture store blasted by gelignite, hijacked buses burned to skeleton in street barricades -- these were the outward signs of last night's (Monday's) violence in Belfast.

The overnight casualty toll in Northern Ireland's strife-torn capital amounted to one man killed and two others wounded in a gun-battle between rival factions of the banned Irish Republican Army. Nearby, a milk roundsman was gunned down in the street early today.

A BBC camera team visited the scene of this shooting and other overnight trouble-spots in Belfast....
SYNOPSIS: Another night of violence in Belfast, Northern Ireland's strife-torn capital. It ended at dawn on Tuesday with a milkman gunned down and critically wounded here--in the Roman Catholic Ballymurphy area. Police think the shooting was a follow-up to an overnight gun battle in another Catholic district.

During the same night, a gelignite blast ripped through this furniture store. It's no coincidence in this city, tern by religious dissension, that the store-owner is Belfast's Protestant mayer. No-one was hurt.

The steel skeletons of burned-out buses litter a vacant lot in the Catholic Falls Road area. This was the area of the overnight gun battle. But this time the British Army patrols ware not involved. While one of the buses burned as a barricade, rival factions of the outlawed Irish Republican Army opened fire on each other.

Three men were rushed to this hospital. One of them--with fourteen rounds of sub-mechinegun ammunition in his pockets--was dead before he got there. The other two had serious gunshot wounds. So Monday night went down as another disastrous milestone in Belfast's troubled history. During the gunbattle, something like two-hundred rounds of single and automatic fire were exchanged.