Dissident IRA faction detonates bomb on Dublin-Belfast rail line; no injuries

Talk about a blast from the past — even if not from a very distant past: A dissident Irish Republican Army (IRA) bomb has detonated near the major Belfast-Dublin railway line sometime in the past few days, injuring nobody, while British army explosives experts successfully dismantled a second bomb, police said Wednesday. The small blast near Cloghogue, a border crossing midway between the two capital cities of Ireland, was not discovered until Tuesday following a two-day search of fields along the rail line, the Police Service of Northern Irelandsaid. It was not immediately clear whether the bomb detonated Tuesday or earlier. Police and soldiers had been searching the area since Sunday night, after telephone warnings from IRA dissidents claimed to have left a bomb on the rail line. The threat appeared timed to coincide with a Belfast summit Monday involving the British and Irish prime ministers, Gordon Brown and Bertie Ahern. On Tuesday, police found remains of an exploded bomb and a second bomb that had failed to detonate. British army explosives officers safely dismantled the device using a remote-controlled robot.

The security alert forced train travelers to take buses between the border towns of Newry in Northern Ireland and Dundalk in the Irish Republic from Monday to Wednesday.