WOULD-BE ASSASSINS.

Auckland Star, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 195, 16 August 1907, Page 5

WOULD-BE ASSASSINS.

A NIGHT EXPLOSION.

SCENE OP DEVASTATION.

(By Cable.—Press Association.—copyright.)

(Received 7-35 a-m.)

LONDON, August 15. A determined effort was made in the course of last night to assassinate Lord Ashtown, a leading spirit in the Irish Liuonist Alliance, an organisation which has gained much hatred by its monthly publication of a list of political outrages, and of extracts from the speeches of agitators.

Lord Ashtown, as news previously cabled will have indicated, has for some months been marked for violence by a certain extreme section of the Nationalists.

The outrage occurred at two o'clock in the morning, at Glenshiry Lodge, his lordship's shooting seat in County Wexford. The only occupants in the house at the time were Lord Ashtown, his gamekeeper, and the latter's wife and two maidservants.

Lord Ashtown was asleep in a bedroom immediately over the drawing-room, when he was awakened by an indescribable and deafening uproar, in which the whole house appeared to be shattered as by a tremendous earthquake. Lord Ashtown was under police protection in the West of Ireland, and it did not take him long to realise that the awful fracas was the result of the explosion of a powerful infernal machine. The windows of his bedroom were smashed, the shutters torn from their fastenings, and the marble mantelpiece wrenched from its place. In the drawing-room below the devastation was more complete. Wreckage was piled up on the floor, doors and furniture had been hurled across the hall, and the floor was covered with debris.

Meantime the curtains and carpet of the room had caught fire, but with the help of the servants and others the outbreak was quickly extinguished.

The explosion was of such terrific force that it awoke people at a mile's distance.