DISSIDENT REPUBLICANS are suspected of carrying out another booby-trap bomb attack on a civilian guard at a police station in Co Tyrone.
It is the third such attack in a week. The intended target, a former member of the police, escaped uninjured but was suffering from shock after the attack at his home yesterday in Cookstown.
The detonator exploded as he drove up a hill on the town’s Sweep Road at around 8am but the rest of the device failed to explode and fell off his red Ford Mondeo. He was able to raise the alarm himself.
A nearby children’s nursery and some homes were evacuated while police and British army technical officers dealt with the alert.
The civilian guard is the latest intended target for the dissident bombers. The other two, a British army major and a Catholic PSNI member, escaped injury after devices fell off their cars without exploding.
The levels of intelligence needed to carry out these attacks, even though unsuccessful, as well as the geographical spread of the attempts, is causing alarm.
Reacting to the latest attack, DUP Mid-Ulster Assembly member Ian McCrea said he felt the time had probably come when the British army should be redeployed on the streets of Northern Ireland.
Sinn Féin’s Francie Molloy said representatives of the dissident groups should step forward to outline what it was that they were resorting to violence to achieve.
Patsy McGlone, the SDLP deputy leader, said if this was the type of national liberation on offer from dissidents, it was something the local community in Cookstown could do without.
Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness branded the bombers as “the real enemies of change”.
“The [Mid-Ulster] constituency has shown itself over the course of the past 12 years to be overwhelmingly supportive of the peace process. Time and time again these people have had their answer.” The dissidents, he added, were interested only in their own “self-serving ends”.
“It is quite obvious there is a number of anti-social elements among them. It’s quite obvious that some of them are agents of elements within British intelligence who have been using [them].”
He said the dissidents comprised a “tiny minority” of republicans who opposed the “democratically expressed wish within the IRA that peace was the best way forward”.
He said they had gone off to form their own groups, were split among themselves, and were now a “highly volatile mixture who have within them the seeds of their own destruction”.
First Minister Peter Robinson said the new political institutions would stand firm against those using violence. “As an administration that enjoys the support of all sections of the community, we will remain steadfast in our determination not to be deterred or deviate from our course,” he said.