Bomb found at Sinn Fein office

BELFAST, Northern Ireland -- A bomb has been found at an office belonging to a senior republican in Northern Ireland.

The device was found in a letterbox at the office of Sinn Fein minister Martin McGuinness, Reuters reported.

Sinn Fein said it was discovered by one of McGuinness' aides. The minister is on holiday.

The device -- described as a pipebomb -- was defused by British army bomb experts at the office in Cookstown.

A pro-British group called the Protestant Red Hand Defenders, which said it was behind the killings of two teenagers last month, said it was responsible for the latest incident.

"Our campaign will increase," a spokesman told a Belfast newsroom in a telephone call, Reuters reported.

The group said it was also behind the planting of a booby-trap bomb under a former republican prisoner's car in Armagh city. Army experts also defused that device.

In another incident, police closed two bridges over the River Foyle in Londonderry after receiving bomb warnings.

Reuters said police was blaming the alerts in the Real IRA, the republican paramilitaries which oppose the 1998 Good Friday peace accord.

Police said a device was discovered near the city's railway line after a telephoned bomb warning.

A report on Wednesday showed that the number of "Mafia-style" paramilitary attacks on youngsters in Northern Ireland has nearly doubled since the peace agreement.

Often the victims are children and juveniles with low IQ levels, beaten in front of their mothers in their own home.

Attacks are carried out by both Catholic and Protestant paramilitaries, the report -- prepared for various parliamentary committees -- said.

The report called 'They Shoot Children Don't They' found that during 1999 and 2000 the squads brutalised 47 under-18s compared with 25 in the previous two years.

It contained a number of eye-witness accounts of beatings, including that from the mother of a 16-year-old attacked by a gang of 10 in his house in west Belfast.

The boy, with a reported IQ of 45, was dragged into the bathroom and beaten.

His mother said: "I could hear him screaming from in there. After that they dragged him outside to the alleyway. I went into the bathroom and saw blood everywhere: after that I passed out."

Another mother told of the beating of her 15-year-old son after he admitted to juvenile delinquency when confronted by five masked IRA men.

"One of them pulled an iron bar from inside a jacket and hit him across the face," she said.

It was the start of a 20-minute beating which left him with a broken jaw, traumatised and barely able to speak.

The report written by Liam Kennedy, professor of modern history at Queens University in Belfast, calls for the immediate establishment of an anti-intimidation unit in Northern Ireland and urges the Stormont Assembly and General John de Chastelain's decommissioning body to monitor the scale of punishment attacks.

The report was written for the cross-community Northern Ireland Committee Against Terrorism and the House of Commons Northern Ireland Affairs Committee, and will be submitted to the Stormont Assembly when it returns after the summer recess.