The Shankill Road bombing was carried out by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) on 23 October 1993 and is one of the most well-known incidents of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The IRA aimed to assassinate the leadership of the loyalist Ulster Defence Association (UDA), supposedly attending a meeting above Frizzell's fish shop on the Shankill Road, Belfast. Two IRA members disguised as deliverymen entered the shop carrying a bomb, which detonated prematurely. Ten people were killed: one of the IRA bombers, a UDA member and eight Protestant civilians, two of whom were children. More than fifty people were wounded. The targeted office was empty at the time of the bombing, but the IRA had allegedly realised that the tightly-packed area below would inevitably cause "collateral damage" of civilian casualties and continued regardless. However the IRA have denied this saying that they intended to evacuate the civilians before the explosion. It is alleged, and unearthed MI5 documents appear to prove, that British intelligence failed to act on a tip off about the bombing. The loyalist Shankill Road had been the location of other bomb and gun attacks, including the Balmoral Furniture Company bombing in 1971 and the Mountainview Tavern attack and Bayardo Bar attack both in 1975, but the 1993 bombing had the most casualties. It resulted in a wave of revenge attacks by loyalists, who killed 14 civilians in the week that followed, almost all of them Catholics. The deadliest attack was the Greysteel massacre. Background During the early 1990s, loyalist paramilitaries drastically increased their attacks on the Irish Catholic and Irish nationalist community and – for the first time since the beginning of the Troubles – were responsible for more deaths than republicans. The UDA's West Belfast brigade, and its commander Johnny Adair, played a key role in this. Adair had become the group's commander in 1990. In 1993 it became public that Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) leader John Hume and Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams were engaged in talks as part of the unfolding Northern Ireland peace process aimed at securing an IRA ceasefire. Loyalists saw this process as a serious threat to their position within the United Kingdom from what they labelled the “pan-nationalist front” (allegedly encompassing the SDLP, Sinn Fein, the Irish government, and even the Gaelic Athletic Association). Throughout the Autumn of 1993 loyalist paramilitaries intensified their campaign of bombings and