Dissident IRA arms cache found

The Real IRA admitted carrying out the Omagh bombing which killed 29

BELFAST, Northern Ireland -- Police say they have discovered a cache of dissident Irish Republican Army weaponry and arrested four people at a home in Catholic west Belfast.

The operation, based on surveillance and an anonymous tipoff, was the latest effort to suppress activity by two dissident groups, the Real IRA and the Continuity IRA, police said.

Both groups oppose the mainstream provisional IRA's 1997 cease-fire. The Real IRA was blamed for the 1998 Omagh bombing which killed 29.

Police told The Associated Press that the weapons, including shotguns and assault rifles, were hidden in a rear wall in Ballymurphy, among the most hard-line IRA districts in Belfast.

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Officers of the Police Service of Northern Ireland and army bomb-disposal experts were continuing to search the property.

Police offered no details on the four people arrested. Under British anti-terrorist law they could he held without charge for up to a week.

The two dissident groups are largely based in the neighbouring Republic of Ireland. Leaders of the mainstream IRA and Sinn Fein, the republican political party, have worked hard to keep them from gaining a foothold in their working-class Catholic power bases in Belfast and Londonderry, the second-largest city in Northern Ireland.

On Friday businessman Colm Murphy, 49, the only man to be convicted in connection with the 1998 Omagh bomb outrage that killed 29 people and injured a further 300, began a 14-year prison term.

Murphy was convicted earlier this week in Dublin of conspiracy to cause the Real IRA explosion in the Co Tyrone town that claimed the biggest toll of deaths in a single incident over all the years of the Northern Ireland conflict.