Britain sent a notorious Irish Republican Army convict back to prison Saturday after accepting police evidence that he had become involved in IRA activity again.
The decision by the British governor for Northern Ireland, Peter Hain, represented a significant warning to the wider IRA, which had more than 200 members paroled early from prison as part of the province's 1998 peace accord.
Among them was Sean Kelly, who was convicted of nine counts of murder and sentenced to life for his role in blowing up a fish shop in a hard-line Protestant neighborhood called the Shankill in October 1993. Among the dead were an elderly couple and two children.
Kelly, 33, was paroled in 2000 but, like the others released as part of the peace process, was warned he could be sent back to serve the rest of his sentence if he didn't steer clear of resumed IRA activity.
"I am satisfied that Sean Kelly has become reinvolved in terrorism and is a danger to others and, while he is at liberty, is likely to commit further offenses," Hain said.
Hain declined to specify the evidence against Kelly, who became the first high-profile IRA veteran to be sent back to prison after winning parole as part of the peace process.
But Protestant political leaders accused Kelly of playing a prominent role in stoking Catholic rioting within his neighborhood of Ardoyne, north Belfast, and praised his reincarceration.
Ardoyne Catholics on Friday night attacked police and a Protestant parade with bottles and gasoline bombs -- police said 18 officers and 11 civilians were injured -- but it wasn't immediately clear if Kelly participated.
"There has been an accumulation of evidence in relation to this particular individual's appearance during trouble and violence in Ardoyne," said Protestant politician Nigel Dodds, the British Parliament member for north Belfast.
But the IRA-linked Sinn Fein party warned that Kelly's reimprisonment was likely to stir up more violence in north Belfast.
The area's top Sinn Fein representative, former IRA car-bomber Gerry Kelly, called Sean Kelly a peacemaker who "has done nothing to warrant this harsh decision and should be released without delay."
When admitting responsibility for the Shankill bomb in 1993, the IRA said it had accidentally killed the nine Protestant civilians -- as well as one of Sean Kelly's IRA colleagues -- in a botched attempt to kill commanders of an anti-Catholic group that had offices above the fish shop. No officials of that outlawed group being targeted, the Ulster Defense Association, were injured in the blast.
The Shankill bomb heralded one of the darkest chapters in Northern Ireland history. Protestant extremists bent on revenge launched a killing spree on Catholics, killing 13 civilians, including seven in a machine-gun massacre at a rural pub's Halloween party.
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