Authorities in Northern Ireland say they have arrested three more people in the killings of two soldiers and a police officer in the province last week.
A total of four people are now in custody over the killing of soldiers Cengiz “Pat” Azimkar, 21, and Mark Quinsey, 23, at the Massereene barracks March 7. Five people have been detained over the shooting of policeman Stephen Carroll, 48, in Craigavon on March 10. The killings were the first political murders of police and soldiers in Northern Ireland in more than a decade. The shootings raised fears that the province could plunge back to the sectarian violence that claimed the lives of 3,600 people in 30 years before the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. But Northern Ireland’s top police officer, Hugh Orde, insisted Sunday that the militant groups that want the province to leave the United Kingdom and become part of Ireland are “small … disrupted, infiltrated and disorganized.” “The current wisdom is that they number around 300 in a population of 1.75 million,” he wrote in Britain’s News of the World newspaper. But, he said: “In the past 18 months or so there have been at least 25 attempts by dissident terrorists to kill officers on and off duty.” Rioting flared near Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland, after an earlier round of arrests Saturday. Police said petrol bombs were hurled at police in Lurgan, west of Belfast. There were no arrests or injuries reported, despite gangs of youths on the streets, authorities said. One of the men arrested in connection with the killing of the soldiers, Colin Duffy, 41, is from Lurgan. He was among three whose arrests were announced Saturday. A fourth man was arrested Saturday night, said the police spokeswoman, who declined to be named in line with policy. She released no details about the man or the location of the arrest. Two more people were arrested Saturday in connection with the Carroll investigation, she said Sunday — a man in his 30s and a woman in her late 30s.
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The Continuity IRA, a republican splinter group that does not accept the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, said it had killed Carroll, Britain’s Press Association reported. The two British soldiers were shot dead a week ago at a base in Massereene, in Antrim, as they were preparing to ship out for duty in Afghanistan. The soldiers had packed their bags and changed into their uniforms, authorities said. Two masked gunmen with automatic rifles shot them as the soldiers picked up a pizza delivery at the barracks, authorities said. Two other soldiers and the two pizza delivery men were seriously wounded. Another militant splinter group, the Real IRA, reportedly claimed it had carried out the attack on the soldiers, the first fatal attack on British troops in the province for more than 12 years. Politicians from across the political spectrum have condemned the killings, with Sinn Fein deputy leader Martin McGuinness calling the killers “traitors to the island of Ireland.”
Sinn Fein is a predominantly Catholic party that wants Northern Ireland to leave the United Kingdom and become part of the Republic of Ireland. The party is widely thought to be linked to the Irish Republican Army. Danny Kennedy, deputy leader of the loyalist Ulster Unionist Party, which wants Northern Ireland to remain part of the United Kingdom, also condemned the attack as “wicked and murderous.”
