Petrol bombs fly again in Northern Ireland

BELFAST, Ireland, March 15th 2009(AFP) — Gangs of youths threw petrol 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, on March 7.
According to a police source, 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, and petrol bombs were later thrown at vehicles belonging to the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), a police spokesman said.
"Missiles including petrol 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 petrol bombs had been thrown since around 7:00 pm (1900 GMT).
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.

Colin Duffy arrested

Belfast Ireland, March 14th 2009, Eirigi spokesman Colin Duffy has been arrested by the PSNI police following a series of early morning raids across the North of Ireland.

PSNI teams in forensic suits have been searching Mr Duffy's house in a private estate in Lurgan, County Armagh.

Two other men have also been arrested in Lurgan and Bellaghy, County Derry, in connection with the 'Real IRA' attack on Massereene Army base last Saturday.

Local republican youths clashed with PSNI personnel deployed to the area.

Mr Duffy is a prominent republican in the area and has endured a lifetime of RUC/PSNI arrests and harassment.

Mr Duffy was released from prison in 1996 when a conviction for murder was quashed by the Appeal Court following three years of false imprisonment,

The prosecution case collapsed when it was revealled that their key witness, screened from view during the trial, was a loyalist gunrunner.

He was the most prominent client of human rights lawyer, Rosemary
Nelson, who was assassinated in 1999 by a unionist death squad. The
RUC/PSNI is widely believed to have colluded in the killing, currently the subject of a public inquiry.

The arrest of Mr Duffy is being viewed as part of a potential 'securocrat' backlash against republican hardliners in the wake of last week's attacks, in which two British soldiers and a PSNI man was killed.

A massive operation is currently underway by British forces in the north Armagh area. A total of six men have so far been arrested in the raids. and further disturbances are expected.

Meanwhile, the political group connected to the 'Real IRA' has warned that "if the conflict in Ireland is to end once and for all, so too must the illegal British claim to sovereignty over the Six Counties.

source: Irish Republican News

Sinn Fein runs risks in handling Northern Ireland violence

By Carmel Crimmins - Analysis
BELFAST (Reuters) -March 12th 2009, Republicans in Northern Ireland's power-sharing administration have reassured their Protestant partners by denouncing guerrilla killings this week, but they risk losing support from hard-line nationalist backers.
Sinn Fein, political ally of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), won plaudits from Protestants who want the province to stay part of the United Kingdom by branding pro-Irish splinter groups as "traitors" for their attacks on security forces.
Two British soldiers were shot dead last weekend and a policeman was killed on Monday in attacks by dissident minority republican guerrillas who seek to reunite Ireland by military means.
The comments by Martin McGuinness, once a senior IRA commander fighting British soldiers in the 1970s and now Deputy First Minister of the province, have angered some nationalist hardliners.
"Sinn Fein and the British forces would want to be careful that they don't inflame the situation by their response," said Jim McAllister, who was a Sinn Fein councilor during the 1980s and 1990s but is no longer a member of the party.
"I think Martin McGuinness has gone some way toward inflaming it."
The attacks by the Real IRA and the Continuity IRA, the deadliest in Northern Ireland in over a decade, come after a number of botched attempts to kill members of the security forces.
McGuinness's comments were designed to reassure Sinn Fein's sometimes reluctant Protestant partners in a power-sharing assembly that they are serious about a 1998 peace deal, which ended the IRA's decades long campaign against British rule.
But in his use of language - the word "traitor" is one of the worst insults in the pro-Irish nationalist camp - McGuinness was also sending a signal to hardliners that he will freeze them out to protect the path Sinn Fein has taken.
Former foes have applauded him and his words have helped cool temperatures in Protestant areas, reducing the threat of tit-for-tat violence which once gripped Belfast.
"When we heard Martin McGuinness speak the other day he spoke from the heart," said Frankie Gallagher, of the Ulster Political Research Group, an organization close to the Ulster Defense Association (UDA), a pro-British paramilitary group.
"Once that leadership was shown, I think it dissipated a lot of anger within our communities."
TESTING TIMES
The Continuity IRA and the Real IRA have warned their operations will continue until Northern Ireland is no longer part of the United Kingdom.
More violence could yet trigger retaliation from Protestant groups, potentially putting Sinn Fein under pressure from Catholic communities who traditionally look to it for protection rather than the police.
For now, that is a remote possibility.
The Continuity IRA and the Real IRA have a tiny support base and most nationalists support Sinn Fein's stance.
But beyond the television cameras, the party will have to put its tough words into action by encouraging supporters to give information to the police -- a practice still considered taboo in some areas.
During three decades of bloodshed between minority Irish Republicans and pro-British Protestants, the police were viewed by many Catholics as a partisan extension of British rule.
Passing tips to the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), as the police was then known, was a dangerous business and so-called "informers" or "traitors" risked execution by the IRA.
The RUC was disbanded and relaunched as the Police Service of Northern Ireland in 2001 in a bid to provide a more impartial force.
Sinn Fein's nationalist credentials mean that it is the only party that can encourage Catholics to talk and isolate the extremists.
"If in a year's time, the threat of dissidents has been contained then people will say that Sinn Fein faced a test and they came through," said Richard English, a professor of politics at Queens University in Belfast.
"The new Northern Ireland might turn out to be something which is more secure than people had feared."
(Additional reporting by Jonathan Saul)
(Editing by Richard Balmforth)

Northern Ireland in silent protest against IRA dissidents

People from the four major church denominations, Roman Catholic, Presbyterian, Anglican and Methodist, turn out for a peace rally at Belfast's City Hall, Northern Ireland, Wednesday, March, 11, 2009. Labor union leaders called on workers across Northern Ireland to come together for a silent protest Wednesday against Irish Republican Army dissidents responsible for killing three people and wounding four others. (AP Photo/Peter Morrison)

By SHAWN POGATCHNIK

BELFAST, Northern Ireland (AP) — Several thousand Irish Catholics and British Protestants united in a silent protest Wednesday against IRA dissidents who gunned down two soldiers and a policeman since the weekend, attacks threatening to plunge Northern Ireland into sectarian bloodshed once again.
More than 2,000 people gathered at lunchtime in front of Belfast City Hall to oppose Northern Ireland's worst dissident Irish Republican Army violence since 1998, the year both sides' politicians struck the Good Friday peace deal that sought lasting compromise through a Catholic-Protestant government.
Thousands more gathered in the predominantly Catholic border cities of Londonderry and Newry, where dissidents remain active in the shadows despite overwhelming public opposition. "No going back," read placards at all the protests.
In Belfast, as a lone bagpiper played a lament, the crowd — among them firefighters and postal workers, former paramilitary convicts and child-cradling mothers — fell stone-silent for five minutes. Some openly wept.
As the crowds dispersed, many shook hands with police officers and offered their condolences over the latest fatality, a 23-year police veteran shot through the back of the head Monday. Others said they wished they could do more to ensure that Northern Ireland's next generation never experiences what they endured through four decades of conflict that left 3,700 dead.
"I'm a Catholic. I grew up in an area where the police were the enemy. Now things have changed so completely for the better," said Aidan Kane, a paramedic who came to the rally with his 6-year-old boy on his shoulders. "If my wee lad here wants to be a policeman when he grows up, I'd be proud. I shouldn't have to worry that some nut might shoot him for serving his community."
Patricia McKeown, president of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, chief organizer of Wednesday's protests, said she hoped the silence of the crowds would "be a silence that thunders around the world."
"End this madness," urged a front-page editorial in the Belfast Telegraph alongside photographs of the three slain men: 48-year-old police Constable Stephen Carroll and two soldiers in the British Army's Royal Engineers: Cengiz "Patrick" Azimkar, 21, and Mark Quinsey, 23.
The Continuity IRA fatally shot Carroll as he sat in a patrol car Monday night. Another splinter group, the Real IRA, killed the two army engineers, and wounded two other soldiers and two pizza delivery men, on Saturday night as Afghanistan-bound troops collected a final meal at their base's entrance.
Both breakaway groups remain committed to the traditional IRA goal of forcing Northern Ireland out of the United Kingdom and into the Irish Republic. Most IRA members renounced violence and disarmed in 2005, eight years after calling an open-ended truce.
In Rome, Pope Benedict XVI condemned the attacks and asked worshippers in St. Peter's Square to pray that nobody else in Northern Ireland "will again give in to the horrendous temptation of violence."
Meanwhile, the British Protestant and Irish Catholic leaders of Northern Ireland's 22-month-old power-sharing government departed Wednesday for the U.S. to seek increased American support for the peace process.
Because of the killings, they twice had canceled the start of their U.S. visit, which seeks to defend and promote U.S. business investment in their land of 1.7 million people.
The trip by First Minister Peter Robinson and Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness now was likely to attract much greater U.S. attention, aides said, but for all the wrong reasons.
The killings have already had the surprising effect of bonding Robinson, long a bitter Protestant opponent of the IRA, and McGuinness, a longtime IRA commander, more closely together than ever before.
They rarely appeared in public together before Tuesday, when they stood shoulder to shoulder with Northern Ireland police chief Hugh Orde and appealed for citizens shielding the IRA dissidents in their communities to identify them to police.
"In Northern Ireland today we are seeing a degree of unity among the political parties that some people thought they would never see in their lifetimes," British Prime Minister Gordon Brown told lawmakers in the House of Commons in London.
In Dublin, Ireland's parliament unanimously passed a motion condemning the return of dissident IRA killings and vowing to help Northern Ireland authorities hunt down the dissidents, who are largely based along the Irish border.
A 17-year-old boy and 37-year-old man arrested Tuesday on suspicion of involvement in Carroll's murder were still being questioned Wednesday. Both suspects come from a Catholic public housing project in Craigavon, southwest of Belfast, near where Carroll was killed.
Associated Press writers Frances D'Emilio in Rome and David Stringer in London contributed to this report.

IRA dissident killings unites Northern Ireland

(AP Photo/Peter Morrison)

By SHAWN POGATCHNIK [AP]
BELFAST, Northern Ireland (AP) — The Protestant and Catholic leaders of Northern Ireland mounted an exceptional display of unity against rising violence from Irish Republican Army dissidents — and vowed Tuesday to defeat hard-liners with the power of popular will.
Former IRA commander Martin McGuinness, who long hoped that slaying police officers would help him achieve his dream of a united Ireland, stood shoulder to shoulder with his Protestant partner atop the government, Peter Robinson, and Northern Ireland police commander Hugh Orde.
The scene itself was an unprecedented surprise. More stunning were the clear-cut words from McGuinness, whose Sinn Fein party has faced years of outside pressure to embrace British law and order. He pledged his personal support to the English police chief, and demanded that his own police-loathing supporters abandon their traditional code of silence and expose the IRA dissidents in their Irish Catholic communities.
"I have to keep my nerve, and to appeal to my community to assist the police services north and south to defeat these people," McGuinness said of the dissidents who killed two British soldiers and a policeman over the past three days — the first such killings in more than a decade.
"There is a duty on me, a responsibility on me to lead from the front, and I expect that people will follow," McGuinness said. He called the IRA splinter groups "traitors to the island of Ireland. They have betrayed the political desires, hopes and aspirations of all of the people who live on this island, and they don't deserve to be supported by anyone."
Analysts said the dissidents' dramatic escalation of bloodshed since Saturday was designed to divide and undermine McGuinness and Robinson as they embarked on their most significant foreign mission: a planned 10-day tour of the United States culminating at the White House on St. Patrick's Day, March 17, to meet U.S. President Barack Obama.
Twice, deadly shootings have obliged the power-sharing chiefs to postpone their departure. They will try again Wednesday, and still expect to meet Obama next week on Ireland's national holiday, the day when Northern Ireland leaders traditionally curry U.S. economic and political support.
But political analysts widely suggested Tuesday that the dissidents, though likely trying to exacerbate tensions between Robinson's Democratic Unionists and McGuinness' Sinn Fein, were having the opposite effect.
After their first-ever joint appearance with the police chief, McGuinness and Robinson — who have kept their distance during eight frosty months sharing power — traveled in the same car together to visit the widow of the most recent victim, 48-year-old Constable Stephen Carroll. The 23-year police veteran was shot in the back of his head Monday night when a gunman from the Continuity IRA dissident group fired on his parked police car.
Carroll had been part of a police backup unit for front-line officers investigating the home of a woman who reported that youths were smashing her windows in a Catholic part of Craigavon. Carroll's widow, Kate, said he had hugged her and told her before leaving home that morning: "Don't worry — they won't get me."
"A good husband has been taken away from me, and my life has been destroyed," she said.
Police raided several homes in a nearby state housing project Tuesday and arrested a 17-year-old-boy and 37-year-old man on suspicion of involvement in Carroll's slaying.
The Northern Ireland Assembly, the 108-member legislature that provides the bedrock for the Robinson-McGuinness administration, observed a minute's silence Tuesday in honor of Carroll's sacrifice. The day before, they did the same in memory of Cengiz Azimkar, 21, and Mark Quinsey, 23 — the unarmed, off-duty soldiers gunned down by another splinter gang, the Real IRA, outside their army base Saturday.
Both the Continuity IRA and the Real IRA are committed to unraveling the 2005 decision by the mainstream "Provisional" IRA to renounce violence and disarm, officially ending its 1970-97 campaign to force Northern Ireland out of the United Kingdom after killing 1,775 people and maiming thousands more.
Politicians and police agree it has been only a matter of luck that, until Saturday, more than 20 dissident attacks against police and army bases since November 2007 have wounded just seven policemen and killed nobody.
Both groups remain small, with estimated membership ranging from 200 to 500, and their pool of recruits is restricted versus previous generations. Whereas the Provisional IRA enjoyed strong support in a largely poor and excluded Catholic minority, today's Catholics are largely middle class, comfortable and pleased to have a share of power.
Nonetheless, experts on the IRA and its dissident offshoots caution that the Real and Continuity factions are unlikely to stop in response to public pressure — because they are pursuing the same stubborn example long set by McGuinness' generation.
"The kinds of things they (dissidents) are doing now is what the Provisional IRA, which was led by Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, was doing 15 years ago," said Kevin Toolis, author of a study of the IRA and commentator on the Sinn Fein-IRA movement.
The dissidents' determination to keep killing police and soldiers is "not alien and foreign to Irish republican thinking," he said.
A fringe political party linked to the Continuity IRA, Republican Sinn Fein, forecast Tuesday that troops and police would always remain subject to attack in Northern Ireland until the territory was merged with the Republic of Ireland.
"It's always been on the cards while England remains here, and while they have their occupying forces here," said Geraldine Taylor, a former IRA prisoner who represents the party in Catholic west Belfast. "It's inevitable that you'll have young people take up arms against the occupation of this country, whether it be the armed force of the police or the British Army."

Unrest in Northern Ireland

Continuity IRA claims responsibility for Northern Ireland police ...Telegraph.co.uk - United KingdomThe Continuity IRA, the republican splinter group, has claimed responsibility for killing a policeman in an ambush in Craigavon, Northern Ireland. ...read more

Northern Ireland's police chief vows to catch officer's killersIndependent - London,England,UKBy Deborah McAleese and Claire Harrison Northern Ireland's police chief Sir Hugh Orde today made an emotional but defiant appeal for help in catching the ...read more

Second shooting 'feels like deja vu'BBC News - UKDuring the Troubles, late night statements from police chiefs about the latest murder in Northern Ireland were part of the daily routine. read more

New York Times: LONDON — A dissident splinter group of the Irish Republican Army took responsibility on Tuesday for the killing of a police officer that sent tremors of apprehension through Northern Ireland just 48 hours after two British soldiers were shot to death. read more

PSNI Officer killed in Northern Ireland.

Belfast Ireland, March 9th 23:30:

It has been confirmed that a PSNI officer has been shot and killed in the Craigavon area tonight.
The incident is understood to have happened near Lismore High School at Brownlow.
Police came under attack while investigating suspicious activity near the school. No links have been made to the killings over the weekend at this time.