DUBLIN (Reuters) - Friends of a champion Irish clay pigeon shooter have fulfilled his dying wish by packing his ashes into shotgun cartridges and blasting his remains over firing ranges around the world. Shooting enthusiast Tony Mullan made the request before he died at Easter aged 63 after a year-long illness.

"Tony said 'I want to go out with a bang and it's up to you guys to help me,'" said Willie Hughes, Mullan's best friend and shooting partner of 20 years.

"So I took the lead out of 50 cartridges, put Tony's ashes into them and recrimped them, and now every ground I go to I fire one off," he added.

"Tony would have done the same for me," he told Reuters.

Mullan, from Dundalk near the Irish border with Northern Ireland, represented Ireland twice at the sport's World Cup in New Zealand and Australia.

Hughes, from the Northern Irish county of Armagh, said some of the ashes would also be incorporated into clay pigeons that Mullan's friends and family would use at a remembrance shoot later in the year.

The rest of the remains were buried with Mullan's parents in Dundalk.

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