'Dissidents may try attacks as N Ireland marks peace'
Police have warned that armed dissident groups are planning violent attacks over the Easter holiday weekend as Northern Ireland marks 25 years since the peace accord that ended three decades of bloodshed. US President Joe Biden is due to visit Belfast next week as Northern Ireland commemorates the signing of the Good Friday Agreement on April 10, 1998.  The US-brokered deal got Irish republican and British loyalist paramilitary groups to lay down their arms and set up a power-sharing government for Northern Ireland. The peace accord largely ended 30 years of violence, known as “the Troubles,” in which 3,600 people died, but small splinter groups mount occasional gun or bomb attacks on the security forces. The Police Service of Northern Ireland Assistant Chief Constable Bobby Singleton said police had received intelligence about planned violence around a parade in Londonderry on Easter Monday commemorating the 1916 Easter Rising against British rule in Ireland. He said there was “potential for dissidents to try and draw us in to disorder and then experience tells us where that happens, that can quite often become the platform for an attack on our officers.” The threat from dissidents prompted UK authorities last month to raise Northern Ireland’s terrorism threat level to “severe,” meaning an attack is considered highly likely.  While the peace forged by the Good Friday Agreement has largely held, the political structures have been through multiple crises.  The Northern Ireland Assembly has not sat for more than a year, after the main unionist party pulled out of the government to protest new post-Brexit trade rules for Northern Ireland. (AP)