By Shawn Pogatchnik
Associated Press
BERAGH, Northern Ireland — Northern Ireland police investigating the killing of an officer announced Wednesday they have seized a major weapons cache and arrested a suspected Irish Republican Army dissident.
Assistant Chief Constable Drew Harris made his announcement as political leaders across Ireland attended the funeral of Constable Ronan Kerr. The 25-year-old was killed Saturday by a booby-trap bomb under his car — the first killing of a member of Northern Ireland’s security forces in two years.
Harris said the weapons discovery and the arrest came as part of the police’s 100-detective effort to identify those responsible for Kerr’s killing. But he said it was too early to say if police had any specific link between the arrested man and Kerr’s killing.
He said the discovery Tuesday night in the overwhelmingly Catholic town of Coalisland appeared to be the biggest seizure of paramilitary weapons in Northern Ireland for several years. Coalisland is about 40 kilometers (25 miles) east of Omagh, where Kerr lived and was killed.
Harris said the weaponry was hidden in several stolen cars in a locked-up garage. He said police seized plastic explosive — including suspected Semtex, tons of which Libya supplied to the IRA — detonators, timer-power units for homemade bombs, parts for armor-piercing rockets, and four Kalashnikov assault rifles with ammunition.
Harris said a 26-year-old man suspected of involvement in the arms dump was arrested Wednesday in Scotland, north of Glasgow, and was being shipped back to Northern Ireland for interrogation.
He said police forensic specialists had already “fast-tracked” the seized weapons for analysis to see if they could be linked to specific IRA dissidents or previous attacks.
“The arms discovery in Coalisland last night will inform lines of inquiry into Ronan’s murder and into terrorist activity generally in that area,” he said.
The IRA received huge shipments of weapons from Libya in the mid-1980s, giving the small underground group the supplies necessary to mount attacks for decades. The arsenal became a major bargaining chip in negotiations between the IRA’s political wing Sinn Fein and Britain — and culminated in the IRA’s historic 2005 decision to disarm and renounce violence.
However, before those peace moves, senior IRA members who disagreed with peacemaking seized at least some of the IRA weapons stores and moved them to new locations.
Dissident IRA attacks over the past four years have demonstrated that the dissidents have retained some Libyan-era weapons, but also are trying to source new weapons stocks through Eastern European smugglers.