IRA Suspected as Bombs Hit English Rail Tracks

Irish terrorists sent fresh signals of frustration and defiance Wednesday with two bomb blasts--and possibly three--that punctuated a national election campaign and saluted a key anniversary of the republican struggle against British rule.

One explosion occurred Wednesday night outside a police station in Northern Ireland, and first reports said one man had been critically injured. But it was not immediately clear whether his injuries were due to a bomb or to police gunfire in the aftermath of the blast.

There were no injuries in two earlier attacks, blamed by police and the British and Irish governments on the Irish Republican Army, but they brought chaos to the national rail network. They exploded half an hour apart Wednesday morning in the northern English town of Wilmslow, an important junction about 160 miles northwest of London. Police think the bombs were placed and timed so that the second would strike emergency personnel responding to the first. It narrowly missed.

The explosions tore up track and destroyed signaling equipment, crippling rail service between London and Manchester, whose downtown shopping area was savaged by a huge IRA bomb in June.

Wednesday’s explosions were preceded by a telephoned warning around dawn from a man with an Irish accent who used a recognized IRA code word. Another warning came around the same time at Doncaster, a key rail point about 60 miles northeast of Wilmslow. That snarled service along another trunk line while police searched for a bomb they never found.

With sectarian violence stuttering in Northern Ireland itself, Scotland Yard Commissioner Paul Condon on Tuesday warned of likely IRA attacks in England leading up to Britain’s May 1 election.

Analysts linked the timing of the attacks to Easter, when republicans celebrate the 1916 uprising in Dublin against British rule, which led to the foundation of the independent Irish Republic in the south of Ireland, with six Protestant-majority counties remaining under British authority as Northern Ireland.

“I see no particular significance in the target. What the new attack means is that we’re back to normal. If the IRA hadn’t lost men and explosives in London [last year] we’d have seen it before now,” said Sean O’Callaghan, a former IRA leader and now one of the group’s most prominent critics.

The IRA broke a 17-month cease-fire with a giant bomb in London in February 1996, killing two men and causing millions of dollars in damage. Since then, though, the terrorists have been stung repeatedly by failed attacks, arrests and the capture of explosives in the London area.

Such significant losses forced IRA leaders to suspend attacks while they searched for a presumed informer, a process that may now be ended, O’Callaghan said Wednesday.

“Now, they want to demonstrate to the incoming government that they can strike, and to their own people that, election or no, they are still at war,” O’Callaghan said.

With the Conservatives led by Prime Minister John Major far behind in the polls, the election is likely to produce the first exchange of power between parties since 1979. But the moribund search for peace in Northern Ireland is not a partisan issue in Britain, and reaction to Wednesday’s attacks was swift and damning across the board.

The Labor Party’s Tony Blair, who looks like a shoo-in as the next prime minister, pledged “an iron determination to stand up to terrorism.” Paddy Ashdown, leader of the Liberal Democrats called the attacks a “futile, stupid, cowardly and potentially fatal attempt by the IRA to bomb themselves into the British election campaign.”

Major said on a campaign stop that Wednesday’s violence was the IRA’s “two-fingered insult to democracy.” Noting that Sinn Fein, the IRA’s political arm, is running candidates throughout Northern Ireland, Major called on party leaders to condemn the bombing.

Martin McGuinness, Sinn Fein’s chief negotiator, demurred, telling reporters in the Northern Ireland city of Londonderry that the British government has never apologized for the killing there of 14 protesters by British troops in 1972.

Wednesday’s explosions came even as the British government was still smarting from accusations that it had abdicated its responsibility for controlling hard-core IRA prisoners inside Maze Prison near Belfast, the Northern Ireland provincial capital.

Allowed to administer their own cellblocks into which guards seldom entered, the prisoners in one had nearly tunneled out of the compound, piling an estimated 45 tons of rubble in two uninspected cells.

Three separate investigations are promised into what critics call lax conditions at a jail that has long been known as “Terrorist University,” where IRA prisoners were not locked in their cells, had access to phones, television sets, VCRs and a gym, ran their own classes in history, politics and the Irish language, and were seldom counted.