Loyalists have been blamed for damaging graves at a cemetery in County Antrim at the weekend.

Families leaving church on Sunday discovered the vandalism at Carnmoney cemetery in Newtownabbey, on the outskirts of north Belfast.

Ten graves were damaged with relatives saying the vandals came from a nearby loyalist estate.

While most of the damage was done to Catholic graves the resting place of a former RUC officer and a Protestant victim of the Ulster Volunteer Force were also damaged.

Raymond McCord, 22, was beaten to death by members of the UVF in 1997 and his body left at a quarry.

His brother Gareth said that the attack at the weekend was not the first time Raymond's grave had been the target of vandals.

You can't get any lower than going to somebody's grave and wrecking their gravestone

Gareth McCord

Mr McCord said that on other occasions sledgehammers had been used to smash the headstone.

"You can't get any lower than going to somebody's grave and wrecking their gravestone," he added.

The cemetery is beside Rathcoole estate, a loyalist housing estate where Catholic postman Daniel McColgan, 20, was murdered by the Ulster Defence Association as he arrived for work in January 2002.

Three weeks ago his grave in Carnmoney was damaged in a similar attack.

Donna Kane found that her mother's grave was among those attacked.

Sectarianism

"Mummy's headstone isn't up yet but they have taken her cross and wee birds and things that the kids had put up for their nanny," she said.

Donna Kane: Mother's grave was attacked

She believes that sectarianism was behind the incident.

It was a view that was shared by other people visiting graves on Sunday.

One woman, who did not wish to be identified, said a group of chanting loyalists had disrupted a Catholic Cemetery Sunday service at Carnmoney in May.

"They have this thing, wherever they got it from, that this is a Protestant cemetery.

"But I can point out a grave where a family of Protestants and Catholics are buried in the same grave," she said.

Donna Kane said that unless loyalist politicians found a way to end the attacks then she would relocate her mother's remains.

"If they say that's them ones winning, well that's them winning.

"They have won a hell of a fight when they are fighting with dead people," she said.