American rap star Obie Trice pictured wearing top honouring dead IRA gunman Bobby Sands whilst on tour

The pictures show the convicted gunman's face on a black top above the word "oglach" (warrior in Irish).

They were purportedly taken in Rotterdam, Holland, where Mr Trice was performing a concert on September 19.

The News Letter has been trying to establish that the images are indeed genuine, and if so how he came to be wearing IRA apparel.

No-one had responded to enquiries at time of writing.

However, a string of websites which specialise in identifying clothing worn by celebrities have posted details of where fans can buy the same t-shirt.

Mr Trice is a native of Detroit, and rose to prominence in the early 2000s as a close associate of fellow Detroit rapper Eminem.

Bobby Sands was a member of the Provisional IRA who was jailed after blowing up a furniture showroom and opening fire on a police patrol in Belfast.

He was later elected an abstentionist Sinn Fein MP for West Belfast and starved himself to death in protest against the government's "criminalization policy" towards republicans who were committing crimes.

By the time of Sands' death in 1981 the IRA had killed about 1,100 people, and went on to kill about another 600 more, the biggest single group of the fatalities being civilians.

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There are two images showing Obie Trice wearing the IRA top.

One was posted on Twitter by an M Griffin (@mgriffin8622), a member of St Thomas' Celtic Supporters' Club in Muirkirk, south-west Scotland, who had been in Rotterdam for a Celtic match on September 19.

It shows Obie Trice wearing the Sands t-shirt at a table inside a pub accompanied by the comment: "Nothing to see here, just Obie Trice out in Rotterdam with us wearing a Bobby Sands t-shirt after doing a gig with Snoop Dog ".

One Twitter user asked where the top had come from, to which @mgriffin8622 responded with a winking face.

The same account also posted up other pictures showed Mr Trice posing in the street front of a giant Celtic banner.

Meanwhile another Twitter account – @certneyj – posted a different picture of Mr Trice wearing the same Bobby Sands top while posing next to a fan on the street on the same day.

In recent years, there has been a renewed focus on the glorification of paramilitary groups across the island of Ireland, often by people who are too young to have experienced the bloodshed of the Troubles.

Efforts to contact Mr Trice's management have met with no response.

Mr Trice was in Rotterdam supporting headline act Snoop Dogg, a rapper who boasts of his ties to the Crips, a crack-dealing street gang whose members have murdered thousands of people – mainly other young black men.

Mr Trice was the victim of a near-fatal shooting in 2005, and according to the Royal Oak Tribune of Michigan, in 2020 he was sentenced to 90 days in jail after admitting buying a gun without a licence.

That conviction followed reports of a shooting in which the 18-year-old son of his girlfriend was shot in the groin in some kind of domestic struggle.

As well as the IRA’s operations in the British Isles, the outlawed group has also carried out killings in Holland.

It was behind a triple fatal shooting of UK soldiers on Dutch soil in 1988.

The group also shot to death Richard Sykes, then British Ambassador to the Netherlands, as well as his Dutch valet, Karel Straub, in Holland in 1979.

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