Two men charged in connection with cross-border terrorism related investigation
Kenneth Fox
Two people have been charged in connection with a cross-border terrorism related investigation.
They were arrested after a vehicle was stopped in Co Laois, and a number of items seized, on Wednesday.
Searches carried out in Northern Ireland as part of the same investigation saw a number of items, including electronic devices, removed for further examination.
Two men in their 30s and 40s were arrested and have since been charged. They are both due before Tullamore District Court on Friday morning.
It comes as Gardaí and the PSNI are investigating whether the four suspect explosive devices were possibly intended for use in terrorist-type attacks on asylum seeker accommodation.
As the Irish Examiner reports, they are understood to be the first charges relating to a violent right-wing organisation in Ireland.
Garda HQ views the arrests and the seizure as a significant development in the emergence of violent right-wing extremism in Ireland, on the back of rising anti-immigrant and far-right protests, rioting, and arson attacks in recent years.
“This is of concern, but probably inevitable in the current climate,” one source said.
The extremist organisation is believed to have been set up relatively recently, with only a small number of members.
The Garda Security & Intelligence Service is understood to have put more resources into preventing and identifying any emergence of violent right-wing or left-wing extremist organisations, with all its agencies on increased alert.
The two suspects, aged 34 and 38, were under surveillance. One of them is from the North, and the other man is thought not to be Irish. The Special Detective Unit swooped on the pair in their car in the Abbeyleix area of Co Laois in the early hours of Wednesday.
Officers seized several suspicious items that supported an arrest for suspected membership of an unlawful organisation under the Offences Against the State Act.
The PSNI later searched an address linked to one of the men in Annalong, along the Down coast. A PSNI statement said: “Officers initially discovered suspicious objects inside the house, with four suspect devices then located in the garden."
