BELFAST, NORTHERN IRELAND — A Protestant militant armed with a gun and explosives tried to enter the Northern Ireland Assembly building Friday shortly after delegates inside missed another deadline on forming a provincial government.
Michael Stone, who spent more than a decade in prison for the murders of three men at an Irish Republican Army funeral in 1988, tried to push his way through a revolving door and threw a bag into the assembly's Great Hall that later was found to contain six to eight explosive devices.
Security staff wrestled Stone to the floor and disarmed him. Two guards were slightly injured.
British army bomb disposal experts later defused the devices. Chief Constable Hugh Orde of the Northern Ireland Police Service said the explosives, described in some reports as homemade pipe bombs, were fairly amateurish in design. But he said that did not "make them any less dangerous."
Orde said Stone was being questioned by police Friday night about what Orde called "a sad publicity act by a very sad individual."
Stone was among hundreds of Protestant and Roman Catholic militants paroled from prison in 2000 under the terms of the Good Friday peace agreement. In a recent television interview, he said he regretted having taken men's lives but also regretted not having assassinated republican leaders Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness.
After Friday's incident, police evacuated and sealed off the building. Politicians and visiting schoolchildren hurried outside to stand in pouring rain.
Before his arrest, Stone spray-painted the granite entrance wall with an anti-Sinn Fein slogan and shouted out, "No surrender!"
The politicians had been meeting inside to discuss a plan put forward by the leaders of Britain and Ireland to resurrect a power-sharing arrangement in Northern Ireland that was part of the Good Friday accord.
The arrangement would involve traditional enemies Sinn Fein, which is the largest Irish republican party in Northern Ireland, and the Democratic Unionist Party, the biggest pro-British Protestant party, sharing power in a 12-member executive.
Early this year, Prime Ministers Tony Blair of Britain and Bertie Ahern of Ireland set Friday as a deadline on the first phase of the deal, which calls ultimately for elections and appointment of a new government led by Northern Irish politicians by next March.
