An Irish paramilitary group responsible for dozens of murders during Northern Ireland's three decades of sectarian violence announced Monday that it has disarmed. The Irish National Liberation Army (INLA)'s announcement came four months after it renounced violence, and follows a political breakthrough in the long-troubled British province last week.
The INLA, a splinter group of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), said it had disposed of its arms in recent weeks through the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning (IICD), which oversees the disarmament process. "We make no apology for our part in the conflict," spokesman Martin McMonagle told reporters in Belfast, but added that the group will now work to promote political progress.
"We believe that conditions have now changed in such a way that other options are open to revolutionaries in order to pursue and ultimately achieve our objectives," he said. The confirmation came after the resolution of a long-running row between the two parties which share power in Northern Ireland, the pro-London Democratic Unionists (DUP) and the Republican Sinn Fein, the political wing of the IRA.
More than 3,500 people were killed in Northern Ireland three decades known as "The Troubles", pitting communities supporting and opposing British rule of the province against each other in a bloody campaign of bombings and shootings. The INLA's highest-profile attack was the 1979 murder of the British Conservative Party's Northern Ireland spokesman Airey Neave - a close aide of future premier Margaret Thatcher - in the House of Commons car park in London. In 1982, the INLA killed 17 people in a bomb attack on the Droppin' Well pub in Ballykelly, County Londonderry. The bar was targeted because military staff at a nearby army base reportedly drank there.
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