Sinn Fein figure threatened

Irish Republican Army dissidents on Sunday threatened to kill top Sinn Fein politician Martin McGuinness and resume attacks in England as part of their efforts to wreck the IRA cease-fire and power sharing in Northern Ireland.

An Easter statement from the outlawed Real IRA sent to Irish news media branded McGuinness a traitor because he holds the top Irish Catholic post in Northern Ireland’s government, sharing power with British Protestants.

The statement warned McGuinness, a former IRA commander, that “no traitor will escape justice regardless of time, rank or past actions. The republican movement has a long memory.”

Supporters later read out the statement at small rallies beside the graves of IRA dead at cemeteries in Dublin and Belfast, Northern Ireland. Anti-terrorist detectives kept a discreet watch on both events.

McGuinness offered no response. He has appealed to the public to tell police about dissident IRA activities and says extremist threats won’t deter him from cooperating with Protestant former enemies.

The Real IRA also claimed responsibility for a long-disputed killing of a Sinn Fein official who was exposed in 2006 as a British spy. Denis Donaldson, Sinn Fein’s former chief legislative official in the power-sharing government, was shot to death at his rural hideaway in northwestern Ireland four months after he confessed his duplicity at a news conference.

An Irish weekly newspaper, the Sunday Tribune, published an interview with an unidentified Real IRA spokesman in which the official warned that the group intended to resume attacks in London. The group in the past has issued statements through the paper.

The Real IRA last launched attacks in the British capital in 2000, when it struck the headquarters of the MI6 spy agency with a rocket and detonated a car bomb outside a British Broadcasting Corp. office.

On March 7, the Real IRA killed two unarmed British soldiers as they received a pizza delivery outside a Northern Ireland army base. Theirs were the first killings of troops in the British territory since the IRA’s 1997 cease-fire. Two days later, another splinter group, the Continuity IRA, shot to death a policeman in what was the first killing of a police officer since 1998, the year of Northern Ireland’s Good Friday peace accord.

The dissidents oppose the IRA’s 2005 decisions to renounce violence and disarm as part of the Good Friday pact, which reinforced the right of Northern Ireland to remain a part of Britain as long as it was the wish of a majority of residents.