§ Lord Hyltonasked Her Majesty's Government:
How many persons have been charged and how many convicted in Northern Ireland in each of the last five years and any subsequent period for offences connected with so-called punishment beatings and shootings. [HL2979]
§ The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Northern Ireland Office (Lord Dubs)The RUC holds records of statistics on offences only under specific crimes—for example, "violence against the person", which are not necessarily related to attacks of a paramilitary nature. Therefore it would incur disproportionate cost to try to extract which of the acts were in fact intended to be so-called punishment attacks.