The PIRA, specifically the Third Battalion of the Provisional IRA Belfast Brigade, was for a long time active in the republican districts on the lower Antrim Road. One of the group's earliest attacks in the local area occurred on 29 October 1971 when a Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) officer was killed by a bomb at the police base on the Antrim Road. On 21 July 1972, two Catholic women (Brigid Murray and Margaret O'Hare) and a Protestant teenager (Stephen Parker) were killed when a bomb detonated on Cavehill Road as part of the Bloody Friday bombings when the Provisional IRA exploded 22 bombs across Belfast in the space of eighty minutes. Shootings between the PIRA and the security forces were regular events in the New Lodge area during the early 1970s and on 4 February 1973 one of these resulted in the deaths of an IRA volunteer and three civilians, were shot dead by British Army snipers. PIRA sniper attacks resulted in the deaths of an RUC officer on 16 October 1973 and a British soldier on 21 March 1974. Both had been on patrol on the Antrim Road when they were hit. The Provisionals also shot and killed a man in September 1974 on Newington Street. A piece of cardboard was found nearby that had written on it: this is the penalty for a sexual assault on a child of seven years old at the Waterworks. After the shooting a caller rang the Irish News and said it had been a punishment shooting carried out by the IRA. On 24 September 1976 they killed two more men, a UDA member and a Protestant civilian, at Cavehill Inn on Cavehill Road, Belfast.