The World - News from March 13, 1989

Army bomb disposal experts defused a 1,500-pound IRA bomb planted near a British military base in Northern Ireland, police said. It took nearly 12 hours to defuse the bomb, which was in a stolen van near the base in Castlederg, near the western border with the Irish Republic. “There’s no doubt that it was the IRA,” a police spokesman said of the outlawed Irish Republican Army, which is seeking to drive the British out of Northern Ireland. Earlier, the main Belfast-to-Dublin railway line, repeatedly damaged by IRA bombs in the past month, was closed again because of a bomb alert.