British Prime Minister Gordon Brown visited troops in Northern Ireland yesterday after a republican splinter group killed two British soldiers in the worst attack in the province in a decade.
Police ramped up the hunt for the killers of the two soldiers who were shot dead late on Saturday as they collected pizzas at the gates of an army base near Antrim, a commuter town outside Belfast.
“You never stood a chance, gunned down by cowardly scum,” read one of the wreaths of flowers laid outside the barracks.
Brown has promised to “bring the murderers to justice” and yesterday visited the army base where the attack took place. The soldiers were the first British troops to be killed in the province since 1997.
A caller to the Dublin-based Sunday Tribune newspaper on Sunday claimed responsibility for the shooting in the name of the South Antrim brigade of the Real Irish Republican Army.
The newspaper said the caller, who used a code word to verify he was authorized to speak for the outlawed gang, defended the shooting and described the delivery men as “collaborators of British rule in Ireland.”
A splinter group that left the main Irish Republican Army (IRA), the Real IRA wants a united Ireland and the withdrawal of all British troops from the province.
Former foes across the sectarian divide vowed the killings would not plunge the province back into violence seen before a 1998 peace deal ended 30 years of conflict known as “The Troubles.”
“A vast majority of people in Northern Ireland want to stick with the peace, want to stick with the political process,” British Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said yesterday. “It’s extremely important that that happens as well as we catch these people.”
The Real IRA carried out the deadliest single bombing of Northern Ireland’s sectarian violence in the market town of Omagh in August 1998. Twenty-nine people were killed.
Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams, whose IRA-linked party represents most Catholics in Northern Ireland, criticized the dissidents.
“There is no popular support for these actions,” Adams told BBC Radio 4 yesterday morning.
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