Irish anti-terrorist police swooped on a suburban Limerick house Friday and seized a trove of explosives and detonators that they linked to Irish Republican Army dissidents.
| "Faith an' 'tis disagreein' I am with the gummint. Where's my explosives?" |
Police also said they arrested a 34-year-old man at the property in the Dooradoyle section of Limerick, 130 miles southwest of Dublin, on suspicion of possessing the weaponry. The commercially manufactured explosives were found in cases in a van outside the property and in a garden shed in the house’s back yard. Police did not say the amount of explosives, nor did they name the dissident group.
Enough explosives to make the newspapers, though.
Surrounding houses were evacuated as an Irish army bomb squad inspected the explosives to ensure they posed no risk of detonating. IRA dissidents opposed to the outlawed group’s 1997 cease-fire continue to plan occasional attacks in Northern Ireland, a British territory. The most recent attack there came Feb. 4, when police found a booby-trap bomb hidden inside a trash can outside the homes of British army families in Ballykelly, Northern Ireland. The dissidents - organized loosely into two small groups called the Real IRA and Continuity IRA - last claimed a life in August 2002, when a Protestant construction worker was killed by a booby-trap bomb hidden inside a lunchbox in Londonderry, the province’s second-largest city. The Real IRA also claimed responsibility for the deadliest terror strike in Northern Ireland history: the August 1998 car bombing of the town of Omagh that killed 29 people and wounded more than 300.
No mercy for these boyos. |