British Army experts defused a 300-pound (150-kg) car bomb Saturday that Irish Republican Army dissidents had abandoned four days earlier in a Northern Ireland village.
Police who found the car bomb parked near a Catholic elementary school in the village of Castlewellan, south of Belfast, initially feared the dissidents might have planted other booby-trap bombs in the area. But after no other devices were found, army engineers used a remote-controlled robot to dismantle the bomb.
IRA dissidents telephoned in at least two warnings describing the bomb's approximate location _ raising police fears they were being lured into an ambush, a past IRA ploy. But the dissidents said in a later statement they abandoned the car bomb short of their intended target, a major army base in nearby Ballykinlar, after encountering heavier-than-expected British security near the installation.
The policeman overseeing the Castlewellan operation, Superintendent Greg Blain, said the dissidents "placed the lives of every man, woman and child in the area at risk. They simply have nothing to offer society."
The dissidents, who operate within the north's Irish Catholic minority, continue to plot occasional attacks in hopes of destabilizing the IRA's 1997 cease-fire and Northern Ireland's Catholic-Protestant government.
IRA dissidents committed the deadliest bombing in the four-decade conflict over Northern Ireland _ a 1998 blast in the town of Omagh that killed 29 people, mostly women and children.
But since that atrocity, they have repeatedly failed to detonate any other car bombs in Northern Ireland. Nearly a dozen car bombs over the past decade have either been abandoned short of their target, intercepted by police or failed to detonate.
A Catholic member of Northern Ireland's power-sharing government, Margaret Ritchie, said the dissidents had caused five days of disruption to Castlewellan, a predominantly Catholic village. She said locals had been forced "to take long detours to get to work or bring children to school."
She said most Catholics were backing the police "to the hilt against those who would bring danger into our midst in such a reckless way."
