Army engineers heighten wall in riot-hit Belfast

BELFAST, Northern Ireland -- British army engineers on Sunday began heightening a barricade between Catholic and Protestant communities in east Belfast in hopes of deterring more riots in the area.

The Short Strand district of east Belfast has suffered weeklong clashes between rival mobs that left five people wounded by gunfire and dozens more, chiefly police officers, injured by thrown rocks, bricks and gasoline bombs.

Sectarian passions have been running high for months in the most bitterly divided parts of Belfast, where nearly 20 walls of steel, brick and barbed wire -- known as "peace lines" -- mark the dividing line between Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods. Army engineers said it might take a few weeks to double the height of the Short Strand walls, which currently stand about four yards tall, small in comparison to other districts scarred by sectarian clashes.

The 1998 peace accord in this British territory created a joint Catholic-Protestant government, but the breakthrough did little to ease traditional hatreds and suspicions in Belfast's front-line communities. British authorities have already built extra peace lines and heightened others in north Belfast because of chronic rioting there.

All three of Northern Ireland's major outlawed groups -- the Irish Republican Army on the Catholic side, and the Ulster Volunteer Force and Ulster Defense Association on the Protestant side -- have been implicated in the violence.

East Belfast remained calm Sunday but rival factions clashed and attacked police in the south of the city overnight.

An unidentified gunman fired two shots at police during the clashes on the Ormeau Road, where the Lagan River divides the community into a Catholic north bank and mostly Protestant south bank. Nobody was reported hurt.

Also Sunday, police said they discovered a stockpile of gasoline bombs in two crates in Donegall Pass, a hard-line Protestant area neighboring the Catholic part of Ormeau Road.