Bombers set 'trap' for police

Terrorists staged a bogus car crash in a bid to lure police officers into a death trap in Derry, it was claimed today.

They may have been poised to detonate by remote control explosives inside a Vauxhall Nova which had been pushed into a lamp post and left with its windscreen shattered on a busy main road on the far side of the city’s River Foyle, security forces believe.

The gang then made a series of telephone bomb warnings to a nearby hotel in the belief the damaged vehicle would also be examined by an RUC patrol.

But investigating policemen fearing some sort of trap stayed away before calling in an army bomb disposal team.

RUC Superintendent Peter Sheridan said: ‘‘There is no doubt, there was a determination to kill.’’

Dissident republicans opposed to the Northern Ireland peace process have been blamed, and security chiefs believe the same group was linked to at least two other failed attacks in the Derry area earlier this year.

The red Nova car had been abandoned close to the Everglades Hotel on the main Derry-Strabane Road.

As army bomb experts finalised a major operation to recover the explosives inside a gas cylinder, police accused the terrorists of a devious and sinister plot to murder.

Superintendent Sheridan added: ‘‘They didn’t care about people walking on that road, or people who regularly jog on it. People should be under no illusions. They were out to kill. The police were fortunate.’’

In January terrorists twice came dangerously close to killing police and troops in the Derry area.

Up to 15 sleeping army officers, one of them a bomb disposal expert, escaped unhurt when a massive mortar bomb struck an accommodation block at Ebrington Barracks. It ricocheted off a wall, but did not explode.

In another attack, this time in the village of Claudy 10 miles from Derry, terrorists tried to lure police officers out through the rear of an RUC station by claiming a bomb had been placed at the front.

But they were unable to find the key to the backdoor which blocked them from fleeing into the path of a tripwire which had been rigged up to a device.