A 66-year-old man has been charged with several offences, including attempted murder, after a car bombing that targeted a Northern Irish police station.
The attack took place on the night of 25 April outside Dunmurry police station, located to the south-west of Belfast. Police have said they believe the New IRA may have been responsible.
The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) announced on Friday that the man, who was arrested under the Terrorism Act earlier in the week, is due to appear before Lisburn magistrates court on Saturday.
He has been charged with attempted murder, possessing explosives with intent to endanger life or cause serious injury to property, causing an explosion likely to endanger life or cause serious injury to property, possession of articles for use in terrorism and hijacking by compelling persons to act.
The suspect is believed to have hijacked the vehicle from a male delivery driver in the Twinbrook area of west Belfast on Saturday with an accomplice, with at least one of them armed with a pistol. They then placed a gas cylinder device in the boot and forced the man to drive towards the police station under threat of death.
Once there, the driver escaped and informed security at the station and police evacuated the area before the device detonated. No casualties were reported. Speaking the next day, Bobby Singleton, the deputy chief constable of the PSNI, said the attack was similar in nature to one on a County Armagh police station in March and also involved masked individuals commandeering a civilian vehicle and fitting it with an explosive device.
Singleton said that officers “immediately and courageously ran into danger, placing themselves in harm’s way, and evacuated nearby homes to protect the community” and claimed it was “nothing short of miraculous” that nobody had been hurt.
The attack has parallels with the tactic of proxy bombs, or human bombs, that were used by the Provisional IRA, from which the New IRA is a distant splinter group, during the Troubles. The tactic involved forcing people to drive cars that had explosives in them to British military targets before detonating them, usually killing the person in the car as well as any targets in the area.
The people forced to commit the attacks did so against their will, with their families often threatened in order to get them to cooperate, and were sometimes chosen for the role due to having communicated with members of the British security forces in some way.