Akhir 28, 1432 H/April 2, 2011, SPA -- A policeman was killed when a bomb exploded under his car in the Northern Irish town of Omagh on Saturday, the first killing in the British-controlled province for two years. The 25-year-old constable died outside his home, a police spokesman said, according to Reuters. The killing comes after an upsurge of shootings and bombings targeting police by nationalist groups that splintered off of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) when it abandoned its armed struggle to unite Northern Ireland with the Republic of Ireland. The attack was quickly condemned by the British and Irish governments and the main political parties representing Northern Ireland's Catholic and Protestant communities, including Sinn Fein, former political wing of the IRA. It was the first fatal attack since March, 2009 when a militant republican splinter group shot dead a policeman, two days after another militant group ended more than a decade of peace by shooting dead two soldiers outside their base. A 1998 peace deal mostly ended the conflict that killed 3,600 people and was fought between predominantly Catholic nationalists and mainly Protestant unionists who want Northern Ireland to remain part of the United Kingdom. Security officials have also thwarted a number of attempted bombs since then, but the peace process is not seen as facing a fundamental threat. Officials said the policeman killed on Saturday was a Catholic. Recent nationalist attacks have been aimed at newly-recruited Catholic police who -- under a targeted recruitment drive -- now make up 30 percent of the force in a province where police were once predominantly Protestant. "HEINOUS AND POINTLESS" Gerry Adams, leader of Sinn Fein, which supports the Republican goal of a united Ireland but has renounced violence, said the party "is determined that this reprehensible act will not set back the progress of the peace and political process". Northern Ireland First Minister Peter Robinson, whose Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) shares power with Sinn Fein, said he and the people of the province were outraged. "I have absolute no doubt that the overwhelming number of people in Northern Ireland want to move on. It is only a few Neanderthals who want to go back. They will not drag us back to the past," Robinson said in a statement. Owen Paterson, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland in the British government, said the murder was "an evil act carried out by enemies of the whole community." South of the border, Ireland's new Prime Minister Enda Kenny called the attack "a heinous and pointless act of terror". The policeman's home town of Omagh was the scene of the worst single attack in Northern Ireland's three decades of violence when 29 people died in a Real IRA car bombing in 1998. Two policemen have lost legs in booby trap explosions over the past two years and an officer's girlfriend was hurt when her car was targeted outside his east Belfast home.
