Large hyperbolic lattices

For a fundamental group of a compact orientable manifold, a condition is specified that is sufficient to guarantee the presence of a “virtual” epimorphism onto a free non-Abelian group. A consequence is deriving a strong Tits alternative. An arbitrary noncompact finitely generated discrete subgroup in PO(3, 1) either is large or is virtually Abelian. An application is provided to the problem of uniform exponential growth for lattices in a 3-dimensional hyperbolic space and of growth of Betti numbers for lattices in a hyperbolic n -dimensional space, where n is an odd number.