Fatal Blast Casts Pall on N. Ireland Peace Effort

A car bomb killed a prominent Roman Catholic lawyer here Monday and pushed the Northern Ireland peace process deeper into crisis as political leaders gathered in Washington to try to salvage it during St. Patrick’s Day talks with President Clinton.

Rosemary Nelson, a mother of three and a lawyer working for the Catholic nationalist community, lost both legs in the blast, which tore apart her silver BMW a few yards from her suburban home and down the block from her daughter’s elementary school. She died two hours later in a hospital.

The “Red Hand Defenders,” a small group of Protestant extremists opposed to last year’s Good Friday peace agreement, claimed responsibility for the bombing.

Members of the Irish Republican Army’s political wing, Sinn Fein, accused police of “complicity” in the attack. Angry Catholic youths threw firebombs at Royal Ulster Constabulary officers near the scene of the killing. No injuries were reported.

Protestant and Catholic political leaders united in condemning the killing, which makes it even more difficult for the two sides to break an impasse over IRA disarmament and the formation of a new power-sharing government in Northern Ireland.

“This atrocity has been committed . . . by those who wanted to damage the [peace] process,” David Trimble, Northern Ireland’s first minister and a Protestant, said in Washington. “It underlines the need for us to ensure that it does not succeed in so doing.”

Appearing with him, Deputy First Minister Seamus Mallon, a Catholic, added, “I think the crucially important thing is that it highlights the need for what we’re doing, the need for a peace process, the need for political stability.”

Despite a cease-fire, two Protestant splinter groups emerged last year calling themselves the Red Hand Defenders and the Orange Volunteers. They have taken responsibility for more than a dozen attacks on Catholic homes and churches with rudimentary pipe bombs that caused damage but no deaths.

The explosive device attached to Nelson’s car, however, was more sophisticated.

The killing occurred at lunchtime in County Armagh, one of the areas of Northern Ireland hardest hit by 30 years of sectarian warfare between Protestants, who want to preserve the province’s union with Britain, and Catholics, who want to see it united with the Irish Republic.

Nelson and her family had been away for the weekend, and her car was left unattended. Police suggested that this might have given the bombers a chance to plant the explosives.

But Sinn Fein local councilor John O’Dowd said police helicopters had been in the area for the previous 48 hours, and he accused the Royal Ulster Constabulary, or RUC, of “collusion.”

The RUC said early today that its chief had asked for a senior British police officer to supervise the investigation into Nelson’s killing and that the head of the FBI had been contacted about the case, Reuters news agency reported.

Nelson had a high-profile practice representing Catholics in their claims against the RUC as well as against Protestant militants. She testified before a U.S. congressional subcommittee last fall that she had received threats from RUC officers against her “personal safety.”

Nelson represented the members of the Catholic Garvaghy Road Residents Coalition in their efforts to keep Protestant Orangemen from marching through their neighborhood during the annual Drumcree Parade in Portadown. She was part of a Garvaghy Road delegation that met with British Prime Minister Tony Blair at 10 Downing St. in London last month.

Blair called her slaying a “disgusting act of barbarity” and said, “The sole aim of the murderers is to remove any chance of reconciliation.”

However, reconciliation had seemed a distant goal even before this killing. The British government has set a deadline of April 2 for the two sides to break their stalemate over Trimble’s demand that the IRA take the first steps toward disarmament before Sinn Fein takes the two Cabinet seats due it in a Northern Ireland executive.

Sinn Fein says the agreement does not require any hand-over of weapons before the executive is seated.

Both sides had been hoping that Clinton could broker some kind of compromise.