Word: craigavon
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...phone call from the Real IRA claiming responsibility for the murder of two British soldiers at Massereene army barracks in March - an attack that stunned Northern Ireland and stoked fears of a return to the sectarian conflict of the past. Two days later, a policeman was killed in Craigavon, County Armagh - the first police officer to be shot dead in the province in 12 years. And a series of low-level disturbances in April - petrol bombs, hoax devices, car-jackings - showed that dissident republicans, although small in number, remained intent on disrupting life in post-conflict Northern Ireland...
...misconceived "new town," built in the 1960s and promoted as an urban utopia, Craigavon looks like the forlorn kind of place where nothing ever happens. Last night, just 48 hours after the murder of two British soldiers by a dissident republican terrorist group, it saw the kind of action Northern Ireland thought it had left behind for good. A policeman, Constable Stephen Paul Carroll, was shot dead in a nationalist area of the town - northern Irish conurbations still tend to be divided along political and religious lines. Carroll was the first officer to be shot dead in Northern Ireland...
...Ireland's security situation in recent times, this spate of attacks had a depressing sense of inevitability. Earlier this month, MI5 - the United Kingdom's intelligence service - raised the security threat posed by dissident republicans to "severe," meaning an attack was regarded as highly likely. Furthermore, the murder in Craigavon wasn't the first time dissidents have tried to kill police officers. An off-duty policeman was shot by the Real IRA in County Tyrone in November 2007, but survived. Security forces in Northern Ireland also say they have foiled major terrorist attacks by dissidents, including defusing a 300lb...
...party has switched gears. Sinn Fein's Assembly member for Craigavon, John O'Dowd, condemned last night's killing as "wrong and counter productive". With Northern Ireland's largest parties all united in condemnation of the attacks and its citizens overwhelmingly opposed to a return to violence, it's unlikely that the dissidents will seriously undermine the democratic institutions their actions are designed to destabilize. But even if the peace process is intact, the peace of Northern Ireland's streets has been seriously disrupted...
...Bogside. Undeterred by the occasional stray bullets whizzing overhead from the "nogo" Bogside area, three bookmakers did a brisk business in totes. Out of 49 hounds needed for the meet's seven races, only 28 had made it. The others were held up on Craigavon Avenue, where traffic was delayed for two hours while British troops searched for explosives and arms...