IRA Blamed For $42M Bank Heist

The Irish Republican Army committed last month's massive raid on a Belfast bank, the Northern Ireland police commander announced Friday in a move certain to complicate the province's peacemaking efforts.

Chief Constable Hugh Orde said his detectives probing the Dec. 20 raid on Northern Bank — when a hostage-taking gang stole an estimated $42 million, the biggest all-cash robbery in history — were confident that members of the outlawed IRA planned and carried it out.

The IRA and its allied Sinn Fein party have repeatedly rejected mounting accusations of IRA involvement in the robbery. But Protestant leaders said the verdict from Orde — who had previously avoided any public comment on the case — would harden their opposition to forming any new power-sharing administration with Sinn Fein, the major Catholic-backed party.

Members of the gang that carried out the robbery at the Northern Bank posed as police officers and walked into homes of two bank officers on a Sunday night, taking them and their families hostage.

The bank officers were forced to help the gang bypass security into the bank's underground main vault, which was cleaned out. The robbers drove off in a truck filled with cash.

Suspicion immediately fell on the IRA. Detectives concentrated searches on businesses in hard-line Catholic parts of Belfast, including the home of a top IRA figure.

"We reject recent attempts to criminalize our volunteers," the IRA said in a statement published in An Phoblacht/Republican News, the weekly newspaper of the IRA and its allied Sinn Fein party.

All other political parties in Northern Ireland and the neighboring Irish Republic criticized the statement as deliberately evasive and vague.

In London, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said evidence of IRA involvement in the robbery would undermine Sinn Fein's claim to a place in any renewed Catholic-Protestant government in Northern Ireland.

The robbery came a week after several months of negotiations involving Sinn Fein, the north's major Catholic-backed party, and the major Protestant-backed party, the Democratic Unionists, concluded with no breakthrough.

Democratic Unionist leaders said the IRA's lack of comment on the Northern Bank heist suggested that the group was involved.

Sinn Fein's moderate rival for Catholic votes, the Social Democratic and Labour Party, also said the IRA was being slippery on key questions.

The IRA killed about 1,800 people from 1970 to 1997 in a failed campaign to abolish Northern Ireland as a part of the United Kingdom. The group began disarming in 2001, after resisting the demand for years, and has offered to hand its remaining weapons stockpiles to disarmament officials as part of a much wider package to revive power-sharing.