The loyalist [Protestant anti-Catholic] murderer Michael Stone forced the suspension of the inaugural meeting of Northern Ireland’s transitional assembly yesterday, when he stormed into the entrance hall of the parliament building armed with a knife, a handgun and what police said was a “viable” bomb.
The extraordinary scenes – as security staff wrestled him to the ground and politicians were evacuated into the rain – overshadowed political rows in the chamber where Ian Paisley was deemed to have signalled the Democratic Unionist party’s conditional assent to power sharing with its republican opponent Sinn Féin. Between six and eight devices were recovered after Stone’s attack. They were defused by the army’s bomb squad.
Connect:
