British Claim Raids Thwart IRA Bomb Plot

Amid dimming hopes for peace in Northern Ireland, British police won a new battle in their war with the Irish Republican Army on Monday, seizing terrorist suspects, weapons and enough ready-to-blow explosives to cripple a major city.

One man died in an orchestrated series of dawn raids; five other suspects were arrested in what police portrayed as a major victory that short-circuited imminent, deadly terrorist violence.

The police strikes in and around London--clearly the work of patient, audacious intelligence--yielded rifles, handguns, bomb-making equipment, 13 detonators, two pounds of terrorist-favorite Semtex explosive and 20,000 pounds of homemade explosives of the sort that the IRA packs into the back of trucks in city centers.

Two trucks and two harnesses for under-car bombs were seized, foiling what Police Commissioner Paul Condon said were plans for “significant” attacks in the near future. London was the most likely target, police suggested.

At Scotland Yard, Assistant Commissioner David Vaness told reporters that the homemade explosives were “ready to use” and ready to be loaded into a van for use in attacks such as that on the Docklands area of London in February that killed two men and the one that devastated downtown Manchester in June with about 3,000 pounds of explosives.

“I can’t exclude the possibility that it [the explosive] could have been used today [Monday] or tomorrow,” Vaness said. He did not speculate on possible targets but said the size and structure of the arsenal made plain the IRA intended “grave loss of life, economic impact and massive damage.”

Monday’s raids occurred in west London, where the suspect was fatally wounded, in outlying Sussex south of the capital and in north London, where explosives were found in a self-storage warehouse.

Police did not immediately identify the slain suspect, but there were reports that he was an IRA “sleeper”--an Irish agent sent some time ago who was at pains to blend into the Hammersmith neighborhood where he lived.

The five arrested men were also of Irish origin, police sources said. One of them was arrested at Gatwick Airport, where he worked for British Airways, but there was no suggestion that the airport might have been on the terrorists’ target list, Britain’s Press Assn. reported Monday night.

Proclaiming himself “absolutely delighted,” British Prime Minister John Major said the arrests and discovery of the huge arsenal “put in their proper context professions of peaceful intentions by Sinn Fein’s leaders and speculation about a new IRA cease-fire. It remains impossible to reconcile Sinn Fein’s rhetoric for peace with the IRA’s preparations for murder.”

In Belfast, the Northern Ireland capital, Gerry Adams, leader of Sinn Fein, the IRA’s political arm, said he regretted the new death in a three-decade war but blamed the British government for what he called the “dangerous . . . vacuum and limbo in which we have all lived for some time. . . . We must seek to fill the vacuum with real talks.”

Sinn Fein is banned from limp-along peace talks in Northern Ireland by the IRA’s refusal to reestablish a cease-fire it abrogated earlier this year with renewed terrorism that included the massive London and Manchester bombings.

In the singular logic of Northern Ireland’s politics, it has been assumed for some time that the IRA would stage at least one more major attack before declaring any new cease-fire, thereby serving notice to Britain of the organization’s long-range resolve while simultaneously satisfying IRA hard-liners’ thirst for action.

Monday’s cache was the third and largest such seizure of IRA weapons in the capital since the IRA broke the cease-fire. In July, police arrested seven men and seized equipment they said was to have been used in bombing utility installations. In February, police found stocks of bomb-making equipment at the home of an IRA bomber who had been killed when a device he was carrying exploded on a London bus.