McGuinness: Prison officer’s killers using ‘flag of political convenience’
The North’s deputy first minister implored anyone with knowledge of the murder to come forward to the PSNI or the Gardaí.
His comments came as a prominent dissident republican, Colin Duffy, and a second man were arrested in Lurgan, Co Armagh, just miles from where Mr Black, 52, was assassinated in a drive-by shooting on the M1 motorway on Thursday.
Duffy, 44, was acquitted by a judge in Belfast earlier this year of the murders of two soldiers shot dead by dissident republicans outside Massereene military barracks in Antrim in Mar 2009.
The second man arrested is aged 31.
The North’s First Minister Peter Robinson said he expected the PSNI were still in the preliminary stages of their investigation and the two arrests should be viewed in that light.
“I think it indicates perhaps more which tribe the police consider the responsibility lies with. Nobody in the community should take it as a signal that the police have the case wrapped up.
“We still require the information from people in the community who may have bits and pieces that could help the police to put a case together. I urge people to do that,” he said.
Mr McGuinness echoed his comments, saying words were not enough and people had to be “wholehearted” in their support of the police, both north and south.
“We can’t have a half- baked approach to how we deal with people who would wish to destroy everything that has been built up over the course of the last 15 years.”
Both men were speaking along with Taoiseach Enda Kenny and Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore at a press conference after a North-South Ministerial Council meeting in Armagh yesterday.
Mr Kenny pledged the full support of the Government and Gardaí to the investigation, saying the Government and executive’s “common voice of condemnation of this murder speaks for the relationship that we have and for the extent of the cooperation that will be given in seeing that the perpetrators of this particular murder will be brought to justice”.
Mr Kenny said that while there had been “a rise in the threat of dissident republicanism”, it was “interlinked with criminality, extortion and drug-dealing”.
Mr McGuinness said dissidents were dressing up their crimes “with a flag of political convenience”.
