Visit our website: HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK --------------------------------------------- [Long live a free Ireland and a free Colombia. For those inclined or compelled to fabricate inanities like what follows, the most compassionate course of treatment would begin in a psychiatric ward.] Tuesday August 14, 10:07 PM IRA link confirmed in arrest of militants in Colombia BELFAST, Aug 14 (AFP) - The Colombian military and sources close to the Irish Republican Army confirmed Tuesday that three men arrested in Colombia for allegedly providing weapons training to leftist guerrillas were IRA members. Colombia's army commander, General Jorge Mora, told BBC radio authorities in Northern Ireland had confirmed that the arrested men "belong to the IRA." "Two of them have spent time in prison for terrorist offences," he said. "They belong to the engineering department of the IRA -- those who make the bombs, the explosives and the custom-made weapons." A source close to the IRA in Belfast, asked if the detained men were members of the Irish paramilitary group, told AFP: "That would be about right." Military authorities in the South American country have accused the men of training anti-government rebels in the use of explosives. They were arrested Saturday at Bogota international airport after arriving on a flight from a demilitarized zone in south-central Colombia ceded to the Marxist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Two of the suspects held British passports and the third an Irish one, all of which proved to be false, authorities there said. Officials in Colombia identified two of the men as Martin McCauley and James Monaghan, residents of Northern Ireland. The third man was travelling under the name David Bracken. John Reid, the British minister for Northern Ireland, said it was difficult to "imagine a worse scenario" than people from the province being linked to a Marxist guerrilla group that was "up to its eyes" in the drugs trade. He confirmed that Britain had provided Colombia with information about the men. "We have assisted them. The judicial process will continue. As they release information people will no doubt make their own judgment." Asked about the affair at a news conference in Belfast, officials from the IRA's political wing, Sinn Fein, also gave a veiled confirmation they were IRA members. "Yes, some of them certainly are, and they would be known to the media," said Sinn Fein's chairman Mitchel McLaughlin when asked if the three were IRA men. Earlier McLaughlin had urged caution, saying: "The information is very scant. People have been arrested, nobody has been charged, nobody has signed confessions." He also warned of "a propaganda dimension" in the way information about the arrests had emerged. For Northern Ireland's Protestant politicians, there was little doubt that the IRA men had been caught in the act and that it proved the group was really not serious about disarming -- the key issue undermining a 1998 peace accord in the province. "They did not go out to Colombia to get a suntan," said Reg Empey, a senior member of the Ulster Unionist party and minister in the power-sharing government set up in Belfast under the peace deal. "They went there to develop and test weapons." Peter Robinson, deputy head of the hardline Democratic Unionists, said the arrests showed that the IRA remained "wedded to violence." __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Make international calls for as low as $.04/minute with Yahoo! Messenger http://phonecard.yahoo.com/ ------------------------------------------------- This Discussion List is the follow-up for the old stopnato @listbot.com that has been shut down ==^================================================================ EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84x2u.a9spWA Or send an email To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] This email was sent to: [email protected] T O P I C A -- Register now to manage your mail! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/register ==^================================================================
