Britain to Scale Back Its Troops in Northern Ireland

Britain will withdraw about 500 soldiers from Northern Ireland due to improving security, the head of the British province’s police said Thursday.

But the announcement, on the day police were questioning three men concerning explosives, seemed to fly in the face of fears that renegade guerrilla groups were planning attacks to wreck the fragile peace process.

A battalion from the Prince of Wales’ Own Regiment, responsible for patrolling Belfast, the provincial capital, will return home next month, reducing the number of soldiers stationed in Northern Ireland to fewer than 14,000.

The Irish Republic, the province’s southern neighbor, has called on Britain to scale back its troops, saying it will help reinvigorate a peace process stalled over the issue of guerrilla disarmament.

British troops have been a constant source of anger for the province’s minority Roman Catholic population and were a target of 30 years of attacks by the Irish Republican Army.

The “Bloody Sunday” shootings of 1972, when paratroopers killed 14 unarmed Catholic marchers, crystallized the ire of republicans, who want all British forces withdrawn.

A source close to the security forces said that the timing of the announcement might appear strange but noted that the battalion had not been deployed on the streets of Belfast since 1998.

Meanwhile, police were questioning three men suspected of links to a republican splinter group, the Real IRA, after seizing 500 pounds of homemade explosives from two cars Wednesday night.

The BBC reported that security forces believe that the haul was linked to the group, which claimed responsibility for a homemade bomb that killed 29 people in the town of Omagh in August 1998.