On the one hand, two teenagers are charged after police were attacked with petrol bombs and paint during a disturbance in west Belfast yesterday evening. On the other, army bomb experts made safe a viable pipe bomb thrown at a police station in Craigavon. And around 350 people were evacuated in Aughnacloy, County Tyrone, last night, when a van containing a 300lbs bomb was left at the police station there. That bomb has also now been made safe. From the RTÉ report
The van was left at the police station at around 10.10pm and a coded telephone warning to a Belfast newspaper claimed it would explode in an hour.
PSNI Superintendent Brian Kee said his officers were still carrying out the evacuation when the 60-minute deadline elapsed but fortunately the bomb failed to go off.
‘If it had detonated it would have caused widespread devastation in the village and it’s very likely that lives would have been lost,’ he said.
A suspected getaway car, a blue Toyota Avensis, was found burned out across the border in Co Monaghan.
Mr Kee condemned those responsible as ‘terrorist criminals’.
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