Belfast: Two men were arrested on Sunday over a car bomb attack in Northern Ireland's Londonderry, with police linking the bomb to the New IRA militant group.
The scene of Saturday night’s car bomb on Bishop Street in Londonderry, Northern Ireland.Credit:PA
The men in their twenties were detained hours after the explosion outside the city's courthouse on Saturday evening local time, Assistant Chief Constable Mark Hamilton said.
"Fortunately it didn't kill anybody, but clearly it was a very significant attempt to kill people here in this community," he said.
Hamilton said the main focus of the investigation was on the New IRA – one of a small number of groups opposed to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement that largely ended three decades of violence in the British-run province. The New IRA has claimed sporadic attacks in recent years.
Saturday's blast came at a time when police in both Northern Ireland and European Union-member Ireland have been warning that a return to a hard border between the two after Brexit – complete with customs and other checks – could risk a return to violence.
Politicians from all sides – including Sinn Fein, the former political wing of the nationalist Irish Republican Army (IRA) – condemned the explosion.
'Shame on you'
"Shame on you. Shame on you and stop," said Mary Lou McDonald, leader of Sinn Fein, which signed the peace agreement.
She told BBC Northern Ireland that the blast was an "outrageous attack".
The Northern Ireland police force said it was just given minutes to evacuate children and hundreds of hotel guests before the explosion of what they described as a highly unstable, crude device that could have detonated at any time.
Officers on patrol spotted a suspicious vehicle at the scene at about 7.55pm local time, then received a warning five minutes later that a device had been left there, the force said.
"We moved immediately to begin evacuating people from nearby buildings including hundreds of hotel guests, 150 people from the Masonic Hall and a large number of children from a church youth club," Hamilton said.
The pizza delivery vehicle was completely destroyed by the blast just 10 minutes after that. The van had been hijacked nearby by two armed men around two hours earlier, police said. Nobody was injured in the explosion.
Hamilton said he thought the attack marked a continuation of militants' campaigns, rather than an escalation.
Reminders of the Troubles are never far away in the Bogside, a prominent Irish Republican Army heartland in Londonderry.Credit:The New York Times
"The New IRA, like most dissident republican groups in Northern Ireland, are small, largely unrepresentative, and just determined to drag people back to somewhere they don’t want to be," he said.
The last fatal attack involving a car bomb was carried out in 2016 by the New IRA when a prison officer was fatally injured by a bomb left under his van in Belfast.
About 3600 people were killed in the conflict that was fought between Protestant unionists who want Northern Ireland to remain part of the United Kingdom and Catholic nationalists who favour reunification with the Republic of Ireland to the south.
"There is no doubt that in terms of the Brexit element, there will be a section within our communities who will want to exploit that and use that to further their own objectives, but I wouldn't put that as the sole purpose," Gary Middleton, a local Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) member of Northern Ireland's devolved government said.
Reuters
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