Northern Ireland police charged two men on Tuesday over a weekend shooting that, along with a failed car bombing, posed new threats to the long-troubled province’s fragile peace process.
The men were charged with attempted murder of a police officer in a border village on Saturday night, Northern Ireland police said.
“The charges are understood to be connected to an incident in the village of Garrison on Saturday 21 November,” police said in a statement.
No one was injured in the shooting that saw police exchange fire with the gunmen. Three other men arrested were later released without charge.
The pair, aged 26 and 32, were also charged with possessing a firearm and ammunition with intent to endanger life, the statement said.
They were scheduled to appear in Dungannon Court yesterday.
Shortly after the shooting, a car containing a 180kg device crashed through barriers outside a police headquarters in Belfast and partially exploded.
Both incidents have been blamed on paramilitaries opposed to the peace process, and fuelled fears of renewed violence, more than a decade after a landmark peace accord.
Police said two men were seen running away from the car after it crashed through the barriers of the policing supervision board.
Northern Ireland’s leaders denounced the attacks, saying there must be “no going back” to the violence of the past.
The attacks come at a delicate time for the peace process.
The main Protestant and Catholic parties, which share power in the province’s devolved assembly, are at loggerheads over when policing and justice responsibility should be transferred from London.
The threat from dissident paramilitary groups is at its highest for six years, said the watchdog monitoring their activities, which called the situation “very serious.”
Northern Ireland has been largely peaceful since the 1998 Good Friday agreement paved the way to power-sharing, after three decades of bloodshed between pro-British Protestants and Catholic opponents of British rule.
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