Officer's murder prompts calls for NI security review

Rank-and-file police representatives today called for an urgent security review after a gunman shot dead the first PSNI officer in the North.

As First Minister Peter Robinson and deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness postponed a planned visit to the United States, Chief Constable Hugh Orde was also urged to call in the SAS in a bid to thwart dissident republicans, who ambushed and killed two soldiers outside a military barracks 48 hours earlier.

The officer was gunned down in Craigavon, Co. Armagh last night after he and colleagues answered a woman’s call for help. An assassin was hiding nearby and opened fire, killing the constable – the first PSNI member to be murdered by terrorists.

The Real IRA admitted shooting the soldiers, and although no organisation has yet owned up to the policeman’s killing, dissident republicans in Co. Armagh, headed up by a man who was once one of the Provisional IRA’s top assassins before he quit the organisation in protest at the peace process, will be the chief suspects.

Mr Robinson and Mr McGuinness, who are due to meet with President Obama at the White House on St Patrick’s Day next Tuesday, were about to catch a flight from London when they decided to return to Belfast, where security chiefs discussed the worsening security crisis. They may travel to Washington later.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown led the condemnation, insisting: “There will be no return to the old days.”

The murdered officer was a married man with a family from Banbridge, Co. Down, just miles from where he was shot, after he and other officers pulled up in two cars at a housing estate, not far from a Catholic Church at Lismore Manor.

They were responding to a woman’s call for help, apparently after a window was broken.

Mr Brown said people did not want a return of guns to the streets.

He added: “These are murderers who are trying to distort, disrupt and destroy a political process that is working for the people or Northern Ireland... They will never be allowed to destroy or undermine the political process.”

British soldiers Mark Quinsey, 23, and Patrick Azimkar, 21, were shot dead outside the front gates of Massereene Military barracks at Antrim on Saturday night.

Two other soldiers as well as two pizza delivery men were badly wounded.

Terry Spence, chairman of the Police Federation, said the terrorists were attempting to drag the people of the North back into the morass of a bloody past.

He added: “We are seeking an urgent re-appraisal of all aspects of the security situation and of the safety of members of the police and security services.”

Mr Orde has already ruled out bringing troops back onto the streets, a decision backed again today by the Secretary of State Shaun Woodward.

The Chief Constable has drafted in undercover British soldiers to carry out surveillance operations, but this murder will inevitably heighten Unionist demands for tougher action.

Jim Allister, a Northern Ireland member of the European Parliament, claimed: “Our present reduced and denuded police cannot cope alone with active republican terrorism. Thus, now is the time to bring in the SAS before it gets out of hand.”