Print version Email to a friend

N.Irish killing a challenge to peace-police chief

Sun, 3 Apr 2011 13:43 GMT

Source: reuters // Reuters

* Too early to say which group behind murder - police chief

* Killers "a potent and dangerous minority"

* Analysts say militants' tactics are limited, lack support

(Adds analyst quotes)

By Ian Graham

BELFAST, April 3 (Reuters) - The first killing of a policeman in Northern Ireland for two years represents a challenge to over a decade of peace in the British-controlled province, Northern Ireland's police chief said on Sunday. Ronan Kerr, a 25-year-old constable who joined the police force only last year, died outside his home in the town of Omagh on Saturday when a bomb exploded under his car, the latest attack targeting police by nationalist groups. [ID:nLDE7310DN]

It was the first fatal attack since March 2009, when two soldiers and a policeman were shot dead in the space of three days, a sudden reminder of the three decades of violence that killed 3,600 people before a 1998 peace deal was struck.

Chief Constable Matt Baggott said it was too early to say which group was behind the murder, calling them a dangerous minority who needed to be expelled from the community and given up to police.

"I think this is a challenge to the peace, a challenge to the devolved administration," Baggott told a news conference, referring to the delicately balanced executive where former foes from Northern Ireland's Catholic and Protestant communities share power.

"This is a potent and dangerous minority who wake up in the morning hating, go through the day hating and go to bed at night hating."

Baggott said the threat from militant groups was no higher than in recent months -- it has remained severe throughout his 20 months as police chief -- and analysts have said the upsurge of shootings and bombings poses no fundamental threat to the peace process.

LIMITED CAMPAIGN

The main fear, according to analysts, is that the groups elicit a reaction from the mainly Protestant loyalist groups who want Northern Ireland to remain part of the United Kingdom but say their tactic of targeting Catholic police officers is a limited one.

"Their violence will never be equivalent to the violence of the provisionals (groups like the IRA), but they will maintain some level of violence which doesn't allow society to move on in the way that it wants to," Pete Shirlow of Queens University Belfast School of Law said.

"It's violence that is taking place post-agreement where the majority of Catholics support policing, so in many ways it's limited and doesn't have any wider support in the way the provisionals had in order to structure a long-term campaign."

Shirlow said Saturday's murder was deliberately timed to disrupt elections to Northern Ireland's power-sharing assembly next month and expected there to be an escalation in violence.

Baggott, who visited the dead officer's family on Saturday, said his murder was made all the more galling because Sunday was Mother's Day in Britain and Ireland.

David Ford, who became Northern Ireland's first justice minister last year in the latest devolution of powers from Britain, joined the condemnation led by the British and Irish governments, and Northern Ireland's political parties.

"It is absolutely clear the small number of people carrying out these acts of terrorism stand totally against the vast majority of the wishes of the people of Ireland, north and south," Ford said.

(Additional reporting by Padraic Halpin in Dublin, editing by Michael Roddy)