SCENE OF SHOOTING:LAST AUGUST rioting erupted in the Brownlow area of Craigavon with the police coming under attack after a series of searches in connection with dissident activity.
Accused by locals of heavy-handed tactics during the operation, police officers were shot at, petrol bombs were thrown and cars were hijacked and burned at the roadside.
Nothing was found and no one was arrested. The trouble died down but the discontent continued to simmer.
Craigavon with its many nationalist housing estates is a planning disaster – a failed unionist “grand project”, a new city named after a former Stormont premier. It incorporates the old townlands of Drumgask, Legahory, Tullygally and Drumgor and made them navigable by a series of roundabouts identifiable only by a series of letters or numbers.
Lismore Manor is a relatively new housing development, a little privately-owned cul-de-sac close to the scene of last summer’s trouble. Older terrace housing, still bearing last August’s anti-Sinn Féin graffiti, back on to the gardens of the new homes of Lismore Manor.
Some of these houses show the improvement efforts of their new owners. Others are empty, others still stand unfinished.
It was here that Constable Stephen Carroll (48) was shot in the head as he answered a call for help from a woman. Her window had been broken and, in her distress, she called the PSNI. As SDLP Assembly member Dolores Kelly put it yesterday: “The woman had a brick thrown through her window and rang the police.”
There is no suggestion that the woman is anything other than genuine and that she merely reported to police the latest antisocial activity near her house.
A sniper could have known this and simply waited for the opportunity to attack.
The PSNI said: “Police responded to the call but, because of a heightened threat in the area, officers from the local station in Lurgan were accompanied by colleagues from a Tactical Support Group (TSG), which provides specialist back-up in potentially difficult or dangerous situations.
“As local officers went to call at the house with the broken window, their back-up colleagues were in an accompanying police vehicle. Two shots were fired, one of which hit TSG officer Constable Stephen Carroll in the head as he sat in the driver’s seat. Tragically, he died as a result of his injuries.”
There are some visible signs of support for dissident republicans in the area. In Ardowen across the road, two-thirds of a Tricolour – the orange section missing – flaps in the wind. Further along, a spray-can sloganeer appeals to the local population not be bought off by the political sellout. The estate has a community centre which houses an “anti-vandalism unit” and a small shop with protection over the windows.
Yesterday, PSNI officers in forensic boiler suits mingled at the scene near where the impromptu shrine of flowers has sprouted. The vehicle in which Constable Carroll was killed was covered by a sheet, loaded on to a lorry and taken away.