Police arrest 7 IRA dissidents over attacks

May 06, 2010|Associated Press

DUBLIN — Police arrested seven suspected Irish Republican Army dissidents yesterday on suspicion of involvement in a wave of bomb attacks in the British territory of Northern Ireland.

The Police Service of Northern Ireland said it arrested three men in the border town of Newry and two others in or near the province’s second-largest city of Londonderry. The Garda Siochana police force in the neighboring Republic of Ireland said its officers arrested two men in the same investigation.

Hours earlier a pipe bomb had exploded — the latest of the attacks — outside the police base in the religiously polarized town of Lurgan. The overnight blast damaged a building across the street but injured nobody.

Northern Ireland police have been on high alert amid fears that IRA splinter groups could mount a major bombing during the United Kingdom’s parliamentary elections today. Northern Ireland elects 18 members to the House of Commons in London.

Security analysts said the arrests could be designed to keep key dissidents behind bars during the weekend. Under British antiterror laws, suspects can be held without charge for weeks.

Last month, dissidents detonated two car bombs outside the Northern Ireland office of the British spy agency MI5 and a police station in the border village of Newtownhamilton. Neither blast caused damage.

The dissidents seek to wreck the IRA’s 1997 cease-fire and the Catholic-Protestant government in Northern Ireland, the cornerstone of the US-brokered Good Friday peace accord.

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