AN EIGHT-YEAR-OLD boy has recounted how he picked up a viable pipe bomb in St Comgall’s Catholic Primary School in Antrim yesterday.
A second Catholic primary school in the town, St Joseph’s, about a mile from St Comgall’s, was also targeted in a bomb alert. Nothing was found at St Joseph’s following searches.
The North’s Minister for Justice David Ford said there was local suspicion that a new group calling itself the Real Ulster Freedom Fighters was responsible.
Brendan Shannon picked up the device in the playground of the school and brought it to his teachers in one of the classrooms yesterday morning. The PSNI was alerted and a British army bomb squad went to the school to defuse the bomb.
The boy had cycled to the school with his twin sister Ciara. With his father Gerard he gave a number of interviews where he detailed how he found the “golden pipe thing” in the playground.
“It was like a golden pipe bomb because it had wire and rope hanging out of it,” he said.
“I just got off my bike and just touched it to see if it was okay or not. It was OK so I just lifted it up,” he said. “I gave it to a teacher and told her where it was,” Brendan explained.
The 400 pupils and their teachers were evacuated from the school to a nearby church hall. The children were later sent home. More than 200 pupils were evacuated from St Joseph’s school.
The boy’s father said the consequences could have been very serious. “I was very worried and very scared when I heard that my son had gone out into the playground, saw something and lifted it up,” he said.
School principal Hilary Cush said he was outraged that anyone would place a bomb in a school.
“It’s absolutely crazy. It’s unbelievable that innocent children should be caught up in something like this,” he said. “They don’t have to be subjected to this type of horror and nightmare.”
PSNI Chief Insp Simon Walls said it was “despicable” to place a viable pipe bomb that could have caused serious injury to a small child. “You take your children to be educated, not to be put at risk by violent and mindless people who have absolutely nothing to say to Antrim or to wider society,” he said.
Mr Ford, the local Alliance Assembly member for the area, condemned the attack. He said there was a suspicion that a new loyalist group calling itself the Real UFF was responsible, as it had targeted three houses in pipe bomb attacks in recent weeks. “It appears to be the same group,” he said. Nationalist and unionist politicians condemned the incident.
