April 26 (UPI) — Police in Northern Ireland said Sunday morning that the New IRA is believed to have been involved in a car bombing near a police station in Belfast.
Detectives are treating a car bombing outside a police station in the Dunmurry area of outer Belfast as an attempted murder, and said called it a miracle that nobody was injured, The Guardian and the Belfast Telegraph reported.
A delivery car was hijacked late Saturday night in West Belfast, an explosive device was placed in the car’s boot and the delivery driver was told to drive to the police station and abandon it there, police said.
Bobby Singleton, deputy chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, told reporters that the attack was nearly identical to an attack earlier this year.
“As a consequence of that, our early working hypothesis is that this may well be the work of the New IRA, who claimed responsibility for the attack in Lurgen,” Singleton said.
“Thanks to the swift actions of police, no one has been injured, which is nothing short of miraculous,” he said.
The attempt on a Lurgen police station in March was unsuccessful because the device did not detonate, but the method — hijacking a car and forcing the driver to abandon the bomb on wheels somewhere — was nearly the same, Singleton said.
