ANTRIM (NORTHERN IRELAND): - Police in Northern Ireland were hunting gunmen from the Real IRA yesterday after the republican splinter group said it killed two British soldiers in the worst attack in the province for over a decade. Two men armed with assault rifles opened fire from a car on four soldiers collecting pizzas at the gates of Massereene Barracks in Antrim, 25km north-west of Belfast, said Police Chief Superintendent Derek Williamson.
He said at least one gunman then got out of the car and shot the soldiers, as well as the two delivery men, again at close range. Four people were wounded, one of them critically.
A caller to the Dublin-based newspaper Sunday Tribune, using recognised code words, claimed responsibility for the Saturday shooting in the name of the South Antrim brigade of the Real IRA.
'He said he made, and the Real IRA made, no apology for targeting British soldiers while they remained what he called occupying the north of Ireland,' said Ms Suzanne Breen, a Tribune journalist.
The two slain soldiers, Cengiz Azimkar, 21, and Mark Quinsey, 23, belonged to the 38 Engineer Regiment, and had been due to fly to Afghanistan just hours after the attack.
Northern Ireland had been a hotbed of sectarian violence between Catholic nationalists - led by the Irish Republican Army and its political wing Sinn Fein - and Protestant unionists loyal to the British crown for three decades, until 1998 when the two sides signed a pact agreeing to share power. Some 3,700 people have been killed in the violence.
A group of die-hard republicans broke away from the now-defunct IRA in 1997, calling themselves Real IRA. They carried out the deadliest single bombing of Northern Ireland's decades-long sectarian 'Troubles' in the market town of Omagh in August 1998, killing 29 people.
Northern Ireland's former foes turned coalition government vowed the latest killings would not plunge the territory of 1.8 million people into a new cycle of violence.
Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness of Sinn Fein said on Sunday: 'I was a member of the IRA, but that war is over now. The people responsible for last night's incident are clearly signalling that they want to resume or restart that war. Well, I deny their right to do that.'
First Minister Peter Robinson, of the Protestant Democratic Unionists, added that the killers had 'no prospect of success in their campaign'.
The shooting followed a police warning last week that the threat from IRA splinter groups was again high.
The Real IRA, which lay low after the Omagh attack, has resurfaced in recent years. They claimed responsibility for shooting two policemen in 2007 in attacks seen as designed to dissuade Catholics from joining the police service.
At the end of January, police defused a 140kg car bomb left by dissident republicans in a Northern Irish village.
After last Saturday's attack, police found the attackers' suspected getaway vehicle abandoned in the nearby town of Randalstown. No arrests were reported.
REUTERS, ASSOCIATED PRESS
