ENGLISH DEYEA NEWS

(photo: AP / Peter Morrison)

By SHAWN POGATCHNIK / The Associated Press | BELFAST, Northern Ireland - Gunmen killed an officer in an attack on a Northern Ireland police patrol Monday, authorities said, two days after Irish Republican Army dissidents shot to death two British soldiers. The shootings fanned fears of a return to retaliatory violence after years of fragile peace.

The latest killing came even as British security chiefs appealed for public help to catch the soldiers' killers — a hunt that challenges Catholics to inform on their own as never before.

"We are staring into the abyss," warned a moderate Catholic politician, Dolores Kelly, after police confirmed that the officer was fatally shot in the head while sitting in his patrol car in the religiously divided town of Craigavon.

No group claimed responsibility, but politicians and an analyst blamed the Real IRA, the splinter group that admitted blame for Saturday's fatal shooting of two soldiers who were collecting pizzas from outside an army base.

The dissident violence resulted in the first killings of security forces in Northern Ireland since 1997 — the year before rival British Protestant and Irish Catholic politicians tried to leave behind decades of bloodshed by striking a peace deal that called for paramilitary disarmament and a future of Catholic-Protestant cooperation in government.

"There is little point appealing to the people who planned and did this, but all of us have to realize we are on the brink of something absolutely awful," said Kelly, a member of a Catholic-Protestant panel that oversees the police. "All of us have to get together to pull ourselves back from the brink. A tiny handful of people with nothing to say and nothing to offer cannot be allowed to destroy so much."

So far, Protestant paramilitary outlaws have maintained their 1994 cease-fire. Before the latest attack, Protestant politicians appealed for their side's extremists not to attack Catholic civilians in revenge.