Attacks Hit Catholic, Protestant Targets

Northern Ireland’s rival paramilitary camps bombed a police station and a Roman Catholic family but no one was injured. There was no immediate claim of responsibility after two homemade grenades were thrown at a police and British army convoy of armored cars arriving at police barracks in east Belfast’s main Catholic enclave. But the attack inside the Short Strand, a neighborhood of 3,000 Catholics bounded by pro-British Protestant areas in the capital, was in line with a series of Irish Republican Army strikes on British security barracks and patrols. In Larne, a mostly Protestant port 20 miles north of Belfast, a Catholic man, woman and baby escaped injury when a bomb exploded under the van in which they were traveling. There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but suspicion fell on the province’s loyalist paramilitary groups.