Attack on N. Ireland Assembly foiled

A Protestant militant armed with a gun and explosives tried to enter the Northern Ireland Assembly building Friday shortly after delegates inside missed another deadline on forming a provincial government.

Michael Stone, who spent more than a decade in prison for the murders of three men at an Irish Republican Army funeral in 1988, tried to push his way through a revolving door and threw a bag into the assembly’s Great Hall that later was found to contain six to eight explosive devices.

Security staff wrestled Stone to the floor and disarmed him. Two guards were slightly injured.

British army bomb disposal experts later defused the devices. Chief Constable Hugh Orde of the Northern Ireland Police Service said the explosives, described in some reports as homemade pipe bombs, were fairly amateurish in design. But he said that did not “make them any less dangerous.”

Orde said Stone was being questioned by police Friday night about what Orde called “a sad publicity act by a very sad individual.”

Stone was among hundreds of Protestant and Roman Catholic militants paroled from prison in 2000 under the terms of the Good Friday peace agreement. In a recent television interview, he said he regretted having taken men’s lives but also regretted not having assassinated republican leaders Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness.

After Friday’s incident, police evacuated and sealed off the building. Politicians and visiting schoolchildren hurried outside to stand in pouring rain.

Before his arrest, Stone spray-painted the granite entrance wall with an anti-Sinn Fein slogan and shouted out, “No surrender!”

The politicians had been meeting inside to discuss a plan put forward by the leaders of Britain and Ireland to resurrect a power-sharing arrangement in Northern Ireland that was part of the Good Friday accord.

The arrangement would involve traditional enemies Sinn Fein, which is the largest Irish republican party in Northern Ireland, and the Democratic Unionist Party, the biggest pro-British Protestant party, sharing power in a 12-member executive.

Early this year, Prime Ministers Tony Blair of Britain and Bertie Ahern of Ireland set Friday as a deadline on the first phase of the deal, which calls ultimately for elections and appointment of a new government led by Northern Irish politicians by next March.

But Friday, Protestant leader Ian Paisley refused to accept his nomination to serve as first minister of the new government alongside McGuinness, who did agree to take the post of deputy first minister.

Paisley later said he would accept the nomination in the future if Sinn Fein publicly agreed to support the province’s police force and judicial system, a step it has refused to take. The IRA, which is allied with Sinn Fein, was virtually at war with the local police force for years.

Behind the scenes, discussions are continuing between the British government and Sinn Fein aimed at sorting out the policing issue.

On Friday, Blair downplayed the delay, saying, “No move forward in Northern Ireland is easy. We’ve learned that over 10 years.

“And it’s not because the people, or indeed the leaders in Northern Ireland, want it to be so, but because each step toward a different and better future is taken alongside the memory of a wretched and divisive past.”

Ahern, speaking in Dublin, said, “It seems that Michael Stone has gone on the rampage again, in a very dangerous way. But he was stopped. It just shows you exactly what we are trying to get away from in Northern Ireland.”

Peter Hain, Britain’s Northern Ireland secretary, has asked for a security report on the attack, which he vowed would not be allowed to derail the political process.

“I think it is very important that the party leaders and the parties now stand together and defend democracy against this kind of violent attack,” he said.