Police: IRA behind $50m bank raid
BELFAST, Northern Ireland -- Northern Ireland's police chief has blamed the Irish Republican Army for a $50 million bank robbery last month, a verdict that could unsettle the peace process.
"On the basis of the investigative work we have done to date ... in my opinion the Provisional IRA were responsible for this crime," Chief Constable Hugh Orde said Friday, using the outlawed group's full name.
"I would not have made that statement without having spent a great deal of time speaking to my senior detectives and my senior analysts," Orde told reporters in Belfast.
He refused to say why he believed the IRA was involved in the December 20 robbery on the Northern Bank, saying this would compromise police work. No arrests have been made and the IRA has denied any involvement.
He said the gang stole £26.5 million ($50 million), not £22 million ($42 million) as had been reported. He said about three-quarters of the stolen money was Northern Bank-branded currency.
Orde said Northern Bank executives "intend to withdraw all their banknotes from circulation and to reissue them in a new color and style."
"The money will not be worth anything as soon as that takes place," he said.
He said the operation, in which two bank employees' families were taken hostage by gang members while the raid took place, was a violent and brutal crime, not "a Robin Hood effort."
Orde accepted there would be political consequences from his verdict but stressed they were for others to deal with.
His comments deal a blow to British Prime Minister Tony Blair's hopes of moving forward the Northern Ireland peace process. Blair has insisted terrorism and criminal activity have no place in the peace process.
The latest bid by London and Dublin to broker a deal between the largest Protestant party, the Democratic Unionists, and the IRA's political wing Sinn Fein collapsed in December over IRA arms decommissioning and organized crime.
Blair and his Irish counterpart Bertie Ahern are trying to revive a power-sharing government that was at the heart of a 1998 peace accord.
Protestant unionists, who support ties to Britain, said Orde's comments proved the IRA was still involved in crime and violence, despite the cease-fire it called in 1997 in its armed campaign against British rule.
"I think that we have exposed that Sinn Fein are not sincere about peace," said Ian Paisley Junior, son of the hardline leader of the province's main Protestant party and a member of Northern Ireland's Policing Board.
"They want their crime and they want to be able to go into politics. Well they can't have both. It's over for them and I believe the process is now over for Sinn Fein and we must move on without them," he told Sky television.
