IRA dissidents toss dud grenade at NIreland police

[May 10, 2011]  DUBLIN (AP) -- Northern Ireland leaders accused IRA dissidents Tuesday of threatening the lives of children during a dud grenade attack on a police patrol.

Nobody was hurt when the homemade device was thrown Monday night at officers investigating reports of a bomb in a hard-line Irish nationalist district of Londonderry.

The city's police commander, Chief Superintendent Stephen Martin, said the grenade was capable of detonating. He said his officers were lured into the area by an earlier bomb threat.

"It is only by sheer good fortune that we do not have a fatality on our hands," Martin said. "I am appalled at the callous disregard and recklessness of those who threw the grenade at police, especially as a number of children were close to officers at the time."

Police have been on alert for likely attacks by Irish Republican Army splinter groups because of Thursday's elections to the Northern Ireland Assembly and several days of ballot counting afterward.

Dissidents typically attack during elections to show their opposition to Northern Ireland's Catholic-Protestant government and wider peacemaking efforts. They killed a policeman, 25-year-old Ronan Kerr, with a booby-trap bomb under his car April 2 at the start of the election campaign. He was the first officer killed since 2009.

Results from the assembly election delivered a resounding endorsement for Northern Ireland's current coalition led by the Protestants of the Democratic Unionists and the Catholics of Sinn Fein. The Democratic Unionists won 38 of the assembly's 108 seats, two more than in 2007, while Sinn Fein won 29, one more.

First Minister Peter Robinson, the Democratic Unionist leader, and Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness, a former IRA commander and Sinn Fein's deputy leader, planned to meet later Tuesday to negotiate plans for a new cross-community administration. It is expected to include at least one post each for Northern Ireland's other three political parties and could be appointed by the full 108-member assembly as early as Thursday.

Ballot-counting, meanwhile, continued Tuesday for the results of elections to Northern Ireland's 26 councils. The Democratic Unionists and Sinn Fein were dominating in the results for those local authorities too.

A key goal of Northern Ireland power-sharing is to build Catholic support for the traditionally Protestant police. A decade of police reform has already transformed the force into 30 percent Catholic, and Sinn Fein -- long supportive of IRA attacks on the police -- have officially supported law and order in Northern Ireland since 2007.

But the dissidents reject Sinn Fein's decision to help govern Northern Ireland and seek to undermine the IRA's 2005 moves to renounce violence and disarm. They have made attacks on police operating or living in Catholic areas a top priority.

Londonderry politician Mark Durkan said the dissidents' threats were making it hard for police to do their jobs in the toughest Catholic areas of the city. He said they had to go carefully when responding to reports of crimes for fear of walking into an ambush. He said if locals wanted better law enforcement, they must help police identify and imprison the dissidents living in their midst.

[Associated Press; By SHAWN POGATCHNIK]

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