Terrorists target Catholic police recruit

Terrorists tried to blow up a Catholic recruit to the new Police Service of Northern Ireland, it was revealed tonight.

A device exploded as the young officer was about to get into his car in Ballymena, County Antrim.

He escaped unhurt after the detonator exploded but failed to trigger the main device.

Army bomb disposal experts were called to Dunclurg Park after the explosion.

The young officer was due to begin his first day on duty in Londonderry on Monday.

Stormont junior minister James Leslie condemned the attack, claiming the incident raised ‘‘serious security questions’’.

Mr Leslie, who is the Ulster Unionist Assembly member for the area, said: ‘‘This is a very shocking incident which has to be condemned on all sides.

‘‘It was a clear attempt to attack a Catholic police officer.’’

The officer was the first PSNI recruit to be targeted since the new police service came into being last October.

The new police service has recruited equal numbers of Catholic and Protestant trainee officers in a bid to redress the religious imbalances which existed in its predecessor, the Royal Ulster Constabulary.

Sinn Fein have opposed the new police service on the grounds that its senior officers are still not accountable enough to the province’s policing board.

They have refused to take their seats on the board until the government changes its police reform legislation.

Nationalist SDLP councillor in Ballymena Declan O’Loan condemned the attack.

He told PA News: ‘‘This appears to be a serious device and a clear attempt to at least maim the officer.

‘‘This housing estate is in a state of shock. This was a very alarming development but I would urge everyone who is resolved to bring about the new beginning to policing not be deflected by such incidents.’’

Last year, the SDLP became the first nationalist party in the history of Northern Ireland to give its support to a police service.

The party broke ranks from Sinn Fein to take its seats on the new police board.

Democratic Unionist Assembly Member Ian Paisley Jnr was alarmed at the explosion.

‘‘Obviously we need to establish what exactly happened but this is a very worrying development,’’ the police board member said.

‘‘Dunclug Park is a quiet residential area and would be quite mixed.

‘‘Community relations would be good. So this is a very serious incident.’’

Meanwhile police and army were out on the streets of east Belfast tonight after students were terrorised by sectarian thugs who had broken in to their third level education college.

Students claimed a number of masked loyalists entered the college on Tower Street and attempted to identify those from the nationalist Short Strand area where sectarian clashes with loyalists have been the worst since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement four years ago.

The building was evacuated under police supervision, and the college forced to close.

It was alleged a number of students were locked in a room and forced to prove they were not from the Short Strand.

One student said they had to ‘‘show identification’’ to the masked men to ‘‘show we were not from the Short Strand area’’.

‘‘It was just so frightening and then we were told to get into the gallery and we were all locked in one room,’’ she said.

‘‘I thought the windows were going to go through. I thought our lives were at risk.’’

Police confirmed they investigated the incident in Tower Street.

They also probed claims that someone had been assaulted and that a car had been damaged.

The incident followed an earlier protest by loyalists on the adjoining Newtownards Road.

Employment and learning minister Carmel Hanna asked for a full report into the incident at the college.

‘‘Initial reports indicate that students and staff at the college were subjected to disgraceful and degrading behaviour by the perpetrators,’’ she said.

‘‘I am appalled and angered, and such behaviour has no place in any decent society and has certainly no place in the neutral surroundings of any educational establishment.’’

The National Association of Schoolmasters and Union of Women Teachers, which represents many of the teaching staff in the building at the time, described the attack as an ‘‘appalling development’’.

NASUWT regional officer Tom McKee compared it to those which ‘‘the Brownshirts perpetrated on the Jewish community in Germany in the 1930s’’.

‘‘There is no justification anywhere for this form of thuggery, and particularly in a school or college,’’ he said.

‘‘All law-abiding people must stand firm against this form of anarchy.’’

Sinn Fein councillor Joe O’Donnell said the attack on the college was another aspect of the ‘‘humanitarian crisis’’ facing the nationalist community in the Short Strand.

‘‘The people here are cut off from medical facilities, shops and now from places of education,’’ he said.

‘‘We are trying to set up emergency supplies but the surrounding loyalist areas are trying to strangle us. It really is terrible at the moment.’’

Mr O’Donnell claimed shopkeepers in the area had been warned not to serve Catholics.

‘‘There are signs and graffiti up all over east Belfast saying ‘no Fenians to be served’,’’ he said.

He added: ‘‘The large monolith of loyalist east Belfast is slowly choking the life out of Catholics in the Short Strand and there is nothing we can do. We are the victims. I can only call on loyalist paramilitaries to stop this campaign now.’’

However, David Ervine of the loyalist Progressive Unionist Party said he did not believe paramilitaries were involved in the attack.

‘‘I am being told by all kinds of people in the community that it was women,’’ he said.

‘‘Our community is saying there were women and not men involved and that there was no paramilitary involvement. This is still not a good situation but we are trying to sort it out.’’

Mr Ervine also dismissed any suggestion that the nationalist community in the Short Strand area was under siege.

‘‘That is just not true,’’ he said. ‘‘It is a community reaction, not a paramilitary one.

‘‘The loyalist community here is seeing itself being accused of all these things in the media and saying ‘well if that was happening, they would have seen it a lot sooner’.

‘‘I am hoping to get all this stopped but we are in a terrible situation and playing PR games is not going to help us,’’ he added.