PETER ROBINSON and Martin McGuinness have led condemnation from both parts of Ireland of a dissident republican bomb attack on the main PSNI base in Derry city centre in the early hours of yesterday.
The 100kg bomb exploded 22 minutes after a caller using a recognised Real IRA code word said the device would explode in 45 minutes.
No one was injured in the blast which happened as police officers were evacuating a sheltered housing accommodation and a fast food outlet. However, buildings in the vicinity suffered serious blast damage.
Mr McGuinness, the Deputy First Minister, said the bombers were an “embarrassment” to the people of Derry.
“If they think they will destroy the political institutions the people of Ireland voted for; if they think they’re going to destroy the working relationship I have with Peter Robinson; if they think they will undermine the peace process, they are living in cloud cuckoo land.”
The bomb was in a taxi which had been hijacked half an hour before the explosion at Cooke Street in the Long Tower area of the city about one mile from the police station.
The driver, who was responding to a call to collect a fare in Cooke Street, was confronted by two masked men, one of them armed with a handgun.
The masked men got into the taxi, a silver Mazda 626, and ordered the driver at gunpoint to drive to nearby Glenfada Park in the Bogside, the scene of some of the Bloody Sunday killings in 1972.
There they placed the bomb into the boot of the taxi and ordered the driver to park the car outside the police station’s security gates.
First Minister Peter Robinson said: “Using a taxi driver to deliver the device shows the cowardice of those behind the attack and my sympathies are with him and all those targeted.”
Minister for Foreign Affairs Micheál Martin said he deplored “an act of reckless, senseless criminality . . . which only acts to reinforce divisions on this island”.
Stormont Justice Minister David Ford also condemned those responsible.
Chief Supt Stephen Martin, the PSNI divisional commander, said: “It’s utter madness to place such a massive bomb inside an area which has sheltered accommodation for pensioners and for young people.”
He added: “We do not underestimate the threat posed by the Real IRA but they do not pose the threat which once existed in the 1970s and 1980s from other republican groups. We are continuing to monitor their activities and more people were charged with terrorist offences by June of this year than in the whole of last year.”
The SDLP Mayor of Derry Colum Eastwood said the attack was a setback for the city after a series of significant advances such as the reaction to the publication of the Saville report and the naming of Derry as UK City of Culture.
He said it was “people who claim to be Irish republicans” who carried out the attack. “The sooner they get off the stage, the better,” he said.
DUP Assembly member and Stormont Speaker William Hay said of the bombers: “They have become more professional, they are at a new level and they are dangerous, ruthless people determined to drive fear into people.”