N. Irish Bomb Scares Force Bridge Closure, Evacuation

Bomb alerts forced police to close a major bridge in one Northern Ireland city and to evacuate shops and homes in another town Wednesday. Extremists opposed to the peace process were suspected in both cases.

British army experts conducted a controlled explosion to neutralize a pipe bomb in the mailbox of an office belonging to Sinn Fein, the Irish Republican Army-linked party, in Cookstown, about 30 miles west of Belfast, the provincial capital. More than 30 surrounding businesses and homes were evacuated for several hours.

Workers for Sinn Fein’s Martin McGuinness, the former IRA commander who holds the British parliamentary seat for the Cookstown area, discovered the pipe bomb when they opened the front door. McGuinness, who is education minister in Northern Ireland’s joint Roman Catholic-Protestant government, was on vacation.

An extremist Protestant group calling itself the Red Hand Defenders later claimed responsibility in a telephone call to a Belfast newsroom.

The group said it had left pipe bombs at several other places, and police later found one outside a Gaelic Athletic Assn. hall in Garvagh, about 25 miles north of Cookstown. Gaelic sports are followed mainly by Catholics.

Anti-Catholic groups using a variety of aliases have thrown more than 150 pipe bombs and other homemade explosive devices at Catholic homes and property this year, without wounding anyone seriously.

Also Wednesday, police in Londonderry closed Foyle Bridge after spotting what appeared to be a bomb near a railway line running beneath the bridge. They said the bridge, one of two major bridges in Northern Ireland’s second-largest city, could remain closed until Friday while army experts examined the device using remote-controlled robots.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but police and politicians said anti-British extremists active in the predominantly Catholic city were suspected.

Meanwhile, a judge in Dublin, the Irish capital, rejected bail applications Wednesday from three suspected IRA dissidents accused of plotting attacks in neighboring Northern Ireland.

The three were arrested last month along with a fourth suspected dissident.