DUBLIN — The police in Northern Ireland on Friday blamed militants opposed to British rule there for the killing of a young journalist who was covering a night of violent unrest in Londonderry.
"We are treating this as a terrorist incident, and we have launched a murder inquiry," Mark Hamilton, an assistant chief constable,
said of the fatal shooting of the journalist, Lyra McKee, 29.
A deputy chief constable, Stephen Martin, told reporters that the police were searching for several suspects. "There was certainly more than one person involved," he said, adding: "This was not done to further any cause. This will have achieved nothing other than to plunge a family into grief."
Mr. Hamilton said the police were attributing the violence and the killing to the New Irish Republican Army, a militant republican group formed several years ago from the merger of several splinter groups. It is not affiliated in any way with the
Provisional Irish Republican Army, which renounced violence in 2005.
Many people in Northern Ireland, primarily Roman Catholics, consider themselves republicans, meaning that they want the region to break away from the United Kingdom and join the Republic of Ireland. But the number who pursue that end through violence is relatively small.
The violence took place in Creggan, a heavily Catholic area of Londonderry — a city that Catholics and republicans generally call Derry — after the police started carrying out searches in the area because of concerns that militant republicans were storing firearms and explosives there in preparation for an attack to commemorate the 1916 rebellion in Dublin known as
the Easter Rising.
