Gangs of youths threw gasoline bombs at police in Northern Ireland on Saturday after a prominent republican was among three people arrested over the murder of two British soldiers.
The troubled province’s police chief, meanwhile, warned that hundreds of dissidents, whom he described as “very dangerous,” were aiming to derail its fledgling peace process.
The three men, aged 21, 32 and 41, were being questioned by police over the shooting of the soldiers at Massereene Barracks in Antrim, northwest of Belfast, on March 7.
PHOTO: AP
A police source said the 41-year-old was Colin Duffy, who has distanced himself from Republican party Sinn Fein since it agreed to share power with pro-London unionists.
In the aftermath of his arrest, gangs of masked youths threw stones at police near Duffy’s home in Lurgan, southwest of Belfast, and gasoline bombs were later thrown at vehicles belonging to the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), a police spokesman said.
“Missiles, including gasoline bombs and stones, have been thrown at police at a number of locations in Lurgan,” a PSNI spokesman said, adding that no one had been injured and no gasoline bombs had been thrown since around 7pm on Saturday.
The spokesman estimated that the youths had numbered around 20 and said that a male in his late teens was arrested, but later released, while a male in his early teens had also been arrested.
The Real IRA, a dissident republican group, claimed responsibility for the March 7 attack that killed sappers Mark Quinsey, 23, and Cengiz Azimkar, 21, in the first such killings for more than a decade.
CCTV footage of the attack — in which four people were also injured in a hail of bullets, when the soldiers stepped outside the barracks to receive a pizza delivery — has helped detectives hunting the killers.
Three men were already being questioned over the killing of policeman Stephen Carroll in Northern Ireland on Monday, an attack claimed by another republican splinter group, the Continuity IRA.
On Saturday, a police spokesman said that they had seized a gun and ammunition while conducting a search in Craigavon, the town where Carroll was shot.
Officers also arrested an unnamed 30-year-old woman and a 37-year-old man in the same town in connection with “serious terrorist offenses.”
The three killings sparked fears of a return to violence a decade after peace accords ended the so-called “Troubles” that scarred Northern Ireland for 30 years, leaving more than 3,500 people dead.
In an article to be published in the News of the World yesterday, PSNI Chief Constable Sir Hugh Orde said that there had been at least 25 attempts by dissident terrorists to kill police officers on and off duty in the past 18 months.
“The current wisdom is that they number around 300 in a population of 1.75 million,” Orde wrote, referring to the number of attackers. “They are also very dangerous, like any cornered animal in its death throes.”
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