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 $\mathrm{PO}(3,1)$ 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.