Real IRA claims shooting

March 9, 2009, ST

The victims were collecting the pizza at the Massereene barracks near Antrim when the gunmen pulled up in a vehicle and opened fire. -- PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS

ANTRIM (Northern Ireland) - THE dissident republican group Real IRA claimed responsibility on Sunday for killing two British soldiers in Northern Ireland, one of the worst attacks since a 1998 peace deal stemmed years of violence.

Gunmen shot the soldiers as they picked up pizzas at the gates of an army base near Antrim on Saturday night. Four people, including two pizza delivery men, were wounded.

A caller to the Sunday Tribune newspaper claimed responsibility for the shooting in the name of the South Antrim brigade of the Real IRA.

'He said he made, and the Real IRA made, no apology for targeting British soldiers while they remained what he called occupying the north of Ireland,' Suzanne Breen, a journalist at the newspaper, told Sky News.

The Real IRA, a splinter group from the Irish Republican Army, carried out the deadliest single bombing of Northern Ireland's sectarian 'Troubles' in the market town of Omagh in August 1998. Twenty-nine people were killed.

Northern Ireland's former foes vowed the killings in Antrim would not plunge the province into a new cycle of violence.

'Their intention is to bring British soldiers back onto the streets. They want to destroy the progress of recent times and to plunge Ireland back into conflict,' said Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams, for years the face of republican opposition to British rule in Northern Ireland.

The victims were collecting the pizza at the Massereene barracks near Antrim, 15 miles (25 km) northwest of Belfast, when the gunmen pulled up in a vehicle and opened fire.
After an initial burst of gunfire, the attackers walked up and shot the victims as they lay on the ground, Irish state broadcaster RTE said.

The two soldiers who were killed were in their 20s and due to fly out for duty in Afghanistan. They were the first British soldiers to be killed in Northern Ireland for 12 years.
Police said one of the delivery men, a Polish national, was critically injured. -- REUTERS