Slain Northern Ireland officer buried

Police announce seizure of arms, suspect arrested

April 07, 2011|By Shawn Pogatchnik, Associated Press

BERAGH, Northern Ireland — As the casket of a slain Catholic policeman was somberly hoisted through his town, Northern Ireland police investigating his killing announced a major weapons cache seizure and arrested a suspected Irish Republican Army dissident.

Assistant Chief Constable Drew Harris revealed the breakthrough yesterday as scenes of exceptional Catholic-Protestant unity, especially between Northern Ireland’s politicians, played out at the funeral of Constable Ronan Kerr.

The 25-year-old new recruit was killed Saturday by a booby-trap bomb under his car in the town of Omagh — the first killing of a member of Northern Ireland’s security forces in two years. The dissidents responsible mount such attacks in hopes of intimidating members of the Irish Catholic minority from joining the Northern Ireland police, a formerly Protestant-dominated force that today is 30 percent Catholic.

Harris said the 100-strong detective team investigating the Kerr killing used intelligence tipoffs to discover the weapons dump Tuesday night in Coalisland, a traditional IRA power base in County Tyrone in central Northern Ireland.

He said detectives arrested a 26-year-old man yesterday in Scotland suspected of links to the arsenal.

The weaponry, the biggest find of paramilitary arms in Northern Ireland for several years, was hidden in several stolen cars in a locked-up garage.

Harris said police seized plastic explosives — including suspected Semtex, several tons of which Libya supplied to the IRA in the mid-1980s — detonators, timer-power units for homemade bombs, parts for armor-piercing rockets, and four Kalashnikov assault rifles with ammunition.

Harris said police forensic specialists were already analyzing the seized weapons for potential DNA links to specific IRA dissidents and ballistic links to particular attacks.

He said the weapons might offer insight “into Ronan’s murder and into terrorist activity generally in that area.’’ But he said it was too early to say if police suspected any link between Kerr’s killing and the man arrested in Scotland.

In Beragh, a County Tyrone village of about 500 residents lying between Coalisland and Omagh, church and government leaders from across Ireland joined mourners and the Kerr family for the officer’s funeral Mass.