IRA blamed as guard shot dead

DUBLIN, IRELAND – Suspected IRA diehards shot and killed a Northern Ireland prison officer Thursday in an ambush as he drove to work, the first killing of a prison guard in nearly two decades in the British territory.

Police said a gunman in a passing car shot David Black, 52, several times as he drove onto the main highway southwest of Belfast. His car plummeted down a grassy embankment into a ditch.

Police found the attackers’ getaway car burned out in the nearby town of Lurgan, a power base for two IRA factions opposed to Northern Ireland’s peace process, the Real IRA and Continuity IRA. They said the car had Dublin licence plates.

No group claimed responsibility. Politicians and police commanders said IRA militants were inevitably to blame and pilloried the various IRA splinter groups still in existence as politically pointless.

“These killers will not succeed in denying the people of Northern Ireland the peaceful, shared future they so desperately want,” British Prime Minister David Cameron said.

“I know that I speak for every decent man, woman and child on this island, north and south, in expressing revulsion at this act,” Irish Foreign Minister Eamon Gilmore said in Dublin.

Gilmore said police in both parts of Ireland would crack down anew on IRA extremists, many of whom live in the Irish Republic near the border.

In Belfast, the British Protestant and Irish Catholic leaders of Northern Ireland’s unity government stood shoulder to shoulder to emphasize that no act of violence would weaken their five-year-old coalition, the central achievement of the territory’s 1998 peace accord.

First Minister Peter Robinson, a Protestant, lambasted the various IRA factions as “flat-Earth fanatics, living in the Dark Ages, spewing out hatred from every pore.”