Lyra McKee killing: ‘new breed of terrorism’ in Northern Ireland, say police
A new breed of terrorist is coming through the ranks in Northern Ireland, the detective leading the hunt for Lyra McKee’s killers said.
Police have arrested two teenagers in connection with the murder of the journalist in Londonderry. Officers suspect they are members of the dissident republican New IRA.
The suspects, aged 18 and 19, were detained under anti-terrorism legislation and taken to a police station in Belfast for questioning, the Police Service of Northern Ireland said in a statement on Saturday morning.
Det Supt Jason Murphy of the PSNI said terrorists were lurking in the shadows. “What we are seeing is a new breed of terrorist coming through the ranks and that for me is a very worrying situation,” he said. He said there had been a sea change in community attitudes and that was demonstrated in the revulsion expressed by many at Thursday evening’s killing. [Continue reading…]
It is dismal to see, like a replay of the bad old days, petrol bombs being lobbed at armoured police Land Rovers, the anger and hatred revived by yet another of the very many Irish loaded anniversaries – in this case the Easter Rising of 1916. Local elections seem to have stirred up resentments as well. With the Stormont power sharing executive in abeyance for more than two years now and no sign of reconciliation, the atmosphere was becoming combustible.
Like the recent amateurish Republican letter bombing campaign, these events serve as a reminder that dissident republican groups are growing more militant. It is not a cheap point to link the upsurge in violence – partly – on Brexit. The possibility of a hard border on the island of Ireland is something that inflames passions that not enough people on the eastern side of the Irish Sea, especially a new generation of British Tory politicians, sufficiently understand. [Continue reading…]
Lyra McKee, the 29-year-old Northern Ireland journalist who was shot dead on Thursday night in Londonderry, considered herself a member of a generation whose lives would be haunted by the legacy of the Troubles of 1968 to 1998 but who would never know such violence themselves.
In an article she wrote in 2016 for the website mosaicscience.com, Ms. McKee spoke of her generation as the Ceasefire Babies — “those too young to remember the worst of the terror because we were either in nappies or just out of them when the Provisional I.R.A. cease-fire was called.”
“I was four,” she wrote, adding: “We were the Good Friday Agreement generation, destined not to witness the horrors of war but to reap the spoils of peace. The spoils never seemed to reach us.” [Continue reading…]