BELFAST, Northern Ireland -- The newspaper's classified ad appeared flat and conventional.
'The Cochrane family and family circle wish to express our deepest sympathy to Mrs. Donegan and family on the death of her husband, Joseph. Our thoughts are with you at this time.'
But the notice carried a message of humanity across the maelstrom of sectarian violence that again threatens to engulf Northern Ireland.
Donegan, 45, a remarkably unpolitical Roman Catholic who rarely voted, was found face down in a Belfast alley last Monday.
He was unrecognizable -- face and head smashed with a club and mutilated with a knife. He was identified by his watch, a family gift.
Donegan was picked up at random by members of the outlawed Ulster Volunteer Force, a Protestant paramilitary group. They were looking for a Catholic hostage for the safe return of a part-time Protestant soldier, Thomas Cochrane.
The Irish Republican Army kidnapped Cochrane as he drove to work in the IRA heartland of South Armagh. The IRA later said Cochrane was 'executed' and his body was found Friday.
Donegan was the victim of the first tit-for-tat killings in Northern Ireland in four years. The classified ad ofsympathy from a Protestant family to a Catholic one also broke the recent pattern.
The sudden violence followed a long period of relative peace between Northern Ireland's two warring religious sects in which the British Army and Royal Ulster Constabulary, the province's police, claimed repeated successes in cracking IRA cells.
Only the Irish National Liberation Army, a left-wing splinter group formed from shattered remnants of the old official wing of the IRA, marred the recent assembly election campaign with a series of bombings and the shooting of a Protestant teacher in front of a class of children.
Both the provisional wing of the IRA and Protestant groups kept their heads down and guns out of sight during the run-up to election day Oct. 20 in order not to spoil the chances of candidates for Sinn Fein, the IRA's legal political voice, and Loyalist candidates.
Sinn Fein won five seats in its first campaign in province-wide elections -- a vote intended by the British to rebuild political bridges between Catholics and Protestants but which proved that Northern Ireland is as deeply divided as ever.
Ballot boxes had barely been emptied. Then Cochrane's disappearance for 'interogation,' the finding of Donegan's battered body and the shooting of a Catholic in Armagh by Protestant gunmen provided bloody proof that the lull in violence was over.
The police forsee yet another cycle of vengeful bloodshed.
'We believe they (gunmen on both sides) will take advantage of the tension and we expect them to do other atrocities as well,' a police spokesman said. 'We are asking the public to be on their guard.'
Within hours, two unidentified men using a hacksaw cut off the hand of a Catholic man tied in a chair in his home in the Protestant town of Larne. A Provisional IRA bomb blasted a police car 40 feet off a lakeside road near Lurgan, southwest of Belfast, killing three officers.
A Protestant group said it kidnapped Eamon Farrell, 16, a Catholic, and his grandmother pleaded: 'Oh please, for God's sake, send him home.'
Roman Catholic Bishop Cahal Daly told Donegan's funeral congregation that terrorists were 'injecting into their veins a poisonous drug that turns the heart to stone and gradually turns ordinary human beings into murder machines.'
A disconsolate moderate Catholic politician, appalled at the political victory by Sinn Fein in the assembly elections, put it in more down-to-earth terms:
'I'm afraid it's all over now bar the shooting.'
