A BELFAST TEENAGER has described how he was dumped into a wheelie bin and left for dead after being subjected to a viciously violent sectarian attack as he left a film set in the city.

James Turley, 18, was working as an extra on the set of ‘The Good Man’, starring Aidan Gillen, in the loyalist Village area of the city when the car in which he and a group of friends were travelling was surrounded by local youths.

Turley, a Catholic, told today’s Irish News newspaper that the gang had smashed a car window and pulled off its wing mirror, forcing the group to flee on foot for their safety – but Turley was unable to escape them.

With the loyalists in pursuit, he tried to hide in a nearby house – pleading to its occupiers to offer him refuge – but was set upon in that house’s garden after one of the gang shouted, “There’s a Taig in there”.

He told the Irish News’ Marie Louise McCrory:

They stamped on my head and everywhere. The woman [the householder] said, ‘Get him out of my garden’, and they dragged me out into the alley.

They just started beating me up again. They put me in a bin and were pushing me somewhere. I didn’t know where I was going.

At one point he was knocked unconscious, but regained consciousness in time to hear one of his attackers say: “That’s enough. I think he’s dead.”

Turley was only able to escape after playing dead and then flagging down a passing motorist, who brought him to hospital, as soon as the gang had left him.

A friend of Turley’s, who was among those in the car when it was set upon, told the BBC there were around 25 people in the gang attacking them – mainly teenagers.

“They were kicking and throwing punches through the window. ”As I tried to close the car door, one of them slammed it onto my leg, back and forth,” he said.

Read a full interview in today’s Irish News (subscription needed) >