Irish Foreign Minister Simon Coveney was evacuated on Friday March 25 due to a security alert, due to a “hoaxaccording to police, as he gave a speech in Northern Ireland at an event dedicated to the peace process.
Read alsoNorthern Ireland: Terror alert level lowered for the first time in 12 years
“After examination“, the investigators came to the conclusion that the suspicious object discovered on the spot was in fact a “hoaxsaid Mark McEwan, a Northern Ireland Police official. This was intended to createmaximum disturbances“, he continued, favoring according to the first elements of the investigation the track of the loyalist paramilitaries of the UVF (Ulster Volunteer Force). The Northern Irish Police haddeclared a security incident as Minister Coveney gave a scheduled speech at the Houben Center in Belfast“, according to the spokesperson for the Irish Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Dublin. “The Minister and his team are safe, taken to a safe place and the PSNI (the Northern Irish police, editor’s note) are doing their job“, he added.
In a statement, local police said they were facing “a security alert in the Crumlin Road area in North BelfastFriday morning, advising motorists to avoid it. According to ITV, a van was hijacked and its driver forced at gunpoint to drive the vehicle to the community center where Simon Coveney was staying. She did not say what happened to the van. In a tweet, the Minister said to himself “saddened and frustrated that someone was attacked“. He had been invited to speak at this event organized by the foundation “John and Pat Hume“.
Read alsoNorthern Ireland: justice confirms the legality of the post-Brexit protocol
Supported by his wife Pat, Catholic John Hume was one of the architects of the Good Friday Peace Agreement signed in 1998 in Northern Ireland to end thirty years of bloody unrest in the British province between republicans, mainly Catholics , supporters of the reunification of Ireland, and Protestant loyalists loyal to the British crown. The threat comes as the terror alert level in Northern Ireland was lowered on Tuesday from “serious” at “substantialfor the first time since 2010.