Northern Ireland Is Shocked by Spate of Violence
Officer Killed Days After Soldiers Died
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Wednesday, March 11, 2009
CRAIGAVON, Northern Ireland, March 10 -- Matt Thompson was watching television Monday evening when he heard a sound he had never wanted to hear again: two loud gunshots.
Just outside his modest stucco house southwest of Belfast, a 48-year-old policeman had been shot dead, apparently by radical forces opposed to Britain's continued rule of the province.
"This is appalling. I've carried the coffins. I've been at the funerals," said Thompson, 56. "I've seen my daughter go through this. I don't want my granddaughter to have to. We can't go back to that."
The killing of officer Stephen Paul Carroll, two days after the slayings of two British soldiers at an army base north of Belfast, has shocked a province that thought its three decades of armed conflict, known as the Troubles, were finally over.
Dissident paramilitary groups said they carried out the killings: The Real IRA said it killed the soldiers, and the more obscure Continuity IRA asserted responsibility for the police killing. Both groups oppose British rule of the province and want it to be reunited with Ireland.
The Irish Republican Army, which led the popular uprising during the Troubles, agreed to the landmark Good Friday peace accords in 1998 and decommissioned its weapons in 2005. The IRA agreed to pursue its cause through politics, but the marginal splinter groups continue to conduct sporadic violent attacks.
Sinn Fein, the political wing of the IRA, is a partner in a new power-sharing government with the province's majority Protestants.
On Tuesday, Martin McGuinness, a Sinn Fein leader who is the provincial government's deputy leader, called the killers "traitors to the island of Ireland."
"They have betrayed the political desires, hopes and aspirations of all of the people who live on this island," he said.
"This is a battle of wills between the political class and the evil gunmen -- the political class will win," said the co-leader of the power-sharing government, Peter Robinson, head of the Democratic Unionist Party, the largest Protestant party.
Robinson and McGuinness postponed a joint trip to the United States for St. Patrick's Day because of the shootings.
Police said Tuesday that they had arrested two men, ages 17 and 37, and were questioning them about the police killing.
