A car bomb has exploded outside a police station in Northern Ireland, injuring two people, days after the final formal steps for the peace process in the province were put in place.
The device blew up at the Newtownhamilton police station late Thursday night after a warning was telephoned to a Belfast hospital, police said.
A car bomb was defused at the same spot in the county of Armagh 10 days ago. The Continuity IRA, which opposes the peace process and last year killed a police officer in the bloodiest three days in Northern Ireland for more than a decade, claimed responsibility for that bomb.
A day earlier another republican group opposed to the peace process, the Real IRA, had detonated a bomb near the Northern Ireland offices of domestic spy agency MI5. The Real IRA shot dead two British soldiers last year, two days before the killing of the police officer.
The latest attacks were apparently timed to coincide with the transfer of police and justice powers from London and the appointment of Northern Ireland’s first justice minister.
The moves are the last formal steps under a process, launched by a 1998 peace deal, that has resulted in self-rule for the province by a government representing both Republicans and Unionists.
Police said they were investigating reports of shots being fired before Thursday’s bombing, which shattered windows and forced homes to be evacuated and residents to be put up in a high school.
“Those who planted this bomb want to drag Northern Ireland back to the dark days of murder and mayhem, they want to undermine the political process, they want politics to fail,” said David Ford, the newly-appointed justice minister.
“I am determined that we will all continue to stand together so that they will not succeed,” Ford, the leader of the non-sectarian Alliance Party, said in a statement.
Northern Ireland’s political leaders, First Minister Peter Robinson and Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness, a former IRA commander, also condemned the attack.
Analysts have warned that republican dissidents remain active, and police have said the risk of attack, chiefly on security forces, is severe.
Police said the two wounded people had been taken to hospital but their injuries were not believed to be life-threatening.
In a separate incident, a pipe bomb exploded outside a house in Coalisland in County Tyrone, shattering windows but injuring no one, police said.
(Writing by Marie-Louise Gumuchian in Dublin; editing by Kevin Liffey)
Reuters
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