Police find possible IRA target list

BELFAST, Northern Ireland -- Police have found a suspected Irish Republican Army list of targets, including British lawmakers and army bases, the government and police chief said Friday. But they said the outlawed group is not preparing to break its cease-fire.

The discovery, made three weeks ago and revealed Friday, sent shock waves through Northern Ireland's ever-fragile peace process.

Politicians from the province's Protestant parties and major opposition Conservatives, who were warned that their office or home addresses were on the list, said they feared potential assassination. Some said the IRA-linked Sinn Fein party should be ejected from Northern Ireland's unity government.

And Mark Durkan, leader of Northern Ireland's moderate Catholic party, the Social Democratic and Labor Party, warned that the IRA remained "active at a number of different levels since the cease-fire. The only people who have been in denial of this at times have been Sinn Fein spokespersons."

Durkan, who is deputy leader of the joint Catholic-Protestant government forged by the province's 1998 peace accord, said he hoped the IRA would continue to get rid of its weapons "as a means of building much-needed public confidence."

British hostility

But Sinn Fein's Martin McGuinness, a former IRA commander who now serves as education minister in the Northern Ireland administration, accused British agents hostile to the peace process of inventing the document.

"Who's saying this? These are the people who are effectively under the control of the 'securocrats' within the British military establishment," McGuinness said. "And I think we have to be highly skeptical about everything we're hearing from these sources."

Police said they found the documents during raids before Easter on the homes of IRA suspects in Belfast. They were looking, so far in vain, for anti-terrorist intelligence records stolen March 17 from a police base.

The BBC reported Friday that the documents stolen listed the codenames of police agents supplying information on the IRA and other outlawed groups, the names and home phone numbers of all police intelligence officers, and the addresses of senior Catholic and Protestant militants.

The IRA called a cease-fire in 1997 after killing more than 1,800 people during a 27-year campaign to abolish Northern Ireland as a British territory. Three Conservative lawmakers and more than a dozen politicians from the province's British Protestant majority were assassinated as part of the campaign.

Police said the target list reflected up-to-date information, including names, addresses and license plates.