Mobs in Belfast Attack Police During Street Riots

Roman Catholic and Protestant rioters bombarded police with rocks, bricks and gasoline bombs Thursday in street warfare that reflected the political difficulties facing Northern Ireland’s 1998 peace accord.

For the second straight night, heavily armored police backed by British soldiers kept rival mobs from attacking each other on the edge of Ardoyne, a hard-line Catholic enclave surrounded by militant Protestant neighborhoods. More than 20 officers were injured, police said.

Ten shots were fired at police lines in two separate incidents, police said. Six bombs were set off and about 46 gasoline bombs and a number of large fireworks were thrown, police added.

A police spokesman said three arrests were made for public order offenses and 24 gasoline bombs were seized before the area was declared quiet at 4:20 a.m. today.

On Wednesday night, rioters in Ardoyne threw more than 100 gasoline bombs and several homemade grenades at police, injuring 39 officers, five seriously, officials said.

“At the start, we had opposing factions facing up to each other, and then of course they turned on us,” Assistant Chief Constable Alan McQuillan said.

One blast Thursday afternoon knocked a 5-year-old boy into a fence, locals said. Police who responded to the explosion leaped to safety when a second device thrown by Protestants failed to detonate; almost as soon as they’d gotten back up, they suffered a barrage of bricks and bottles from Catholics.

Despite the riots and the uncertain future of the region’s fledgling government, Gerry Adams, the leader of Sinn Fein, the political arm of the Irish Republican Army, said Thursday that the peace process is moving ahead.

“Obviously the process is having difficulties,” Adams told reporters in Washington. “Yet the situation is better than it has been for many years in the past. We’re coming out of decades of inequality and institutional violence. We’re trying to build peace.

“Unlike the Middle East, the process in Ireland is moving forward. . . . This process is going to succeed,” Adams said after talks with members of Congress.

President Bush has sent Richard Haass, his special envoy for the province, to help resolve a growing crisis that developed when David Trimble, the Protestant head of the power-sharing government, repeated a threat to resign if the outlawed IRA does not start handing over weapons by July 1. The IRA on Wednesday accused the British government of failing to meet its promises in Northern Ireland and said it would not begin disarming.

Adams said he will meet with Haass when he returns home today.