Republican militants seriously injured a police officer when they exploded a bomb under his car in Northern Ireland yesterday, police said, in the latest of increasingly frequent attacks in the province.
Police spokesman Derek Williamson said a dissident group was clearly behind the attack that left the 33-year-old police officer in a very serious condition in hospital, but that it was too early to say which.
Attacks, often directed at police officers, have increased since nationalist splinter groups killed two soldiers in March 2009 at an army barracks a few miles from the scene of yesterday's attack in County Antrim, northwest of Belfast, and killed a policeman a day later.
"This was an attempt to murder," Barry Gilligan, chairman of the Northern Ireland Policing Board, a watchdog whose headquarters were the target of a car bomb in November, said of yesterday's explosion.
The March deaths marked a low point since the 1998 Good Friday peace agreement largely ended three decades of conflict in which more than 3,600 people were killed.
Northern Irish Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness, a former Irish Republican Army (IRA) commander, joined First Minister Peter Robinson, a pro-British politician, and Ireland's Prime Minister Brian Cowen in condemning the attack.
"The man injured today in this attack contributes positively to the community. He is an active member of the GAA (Gaelic Athletic Association) and an Irish speaker. The people who carried out this attack make no contribution," Sinn Fein's McGuinness said in a statement.
Most analysts agree the groups have so far not posed a fundamental threat to a 2007 power-sharing deal run jointly by Sinn Fein, which wants a united Ireland, and pro-British unionists, led by Robinson's Democratic Unionist Party (DUP).
However, the latest attack will add to the pressure already on the executive over a dispute on the transfer of policing powers from London and recent disclosures that Peter Robinson's wife tried to kill herself after having an extramarital affair.
"Those difficulties have become a bit of a distraction," Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams said of Mr Robinson's family problems, adding that a meeting with the DUP on Thursday about the policing powers again produced no results.