2 Men Arrested in Killing of Lyra McKee, Northern Ireland Journalist

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/20/world/europe/lyra-mckee-northern-ireland-arrests.html

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LONDON — The police in Northern Ireland said on Saturday that they had arrested two men under the terrorism act in connection with the killing of Lyra McKee, a journalist who was covering a night of violent unrest in Londonderry.

The men, ages 18 and 19, were taken to a police station in Belfast, the capital, which handles serious investigations, to be questioned in the killing of Ms. McKee on Thursday in the Creggan area of Derry, the Derry City and Strabane District Police said in a statement on Twitter. Londonderry is known to many of its residents, especially those who are Roman Catholic, as Derry.

The police said on Friday that they were attributing the killing on Thursday night to the New Irish Republican Army, a militant splinter group.

The violence that night came on the 21st anniversary of the Good Friday agreement, the 1998 accord that largely brought an end to decades of conflict in the region between republicans or nationalists, largely Catholic, who believe Northern Ireland should be part of a united Ireland, and unionists, largely Protestant, who want it to remain British.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, Ms. McKee, 29, was the first journalist to be killed in Northern Ireland since 2001, when loyalists — unionist extremists — shot dead Martin O’Hagan, a reporter investigating paramilitaries and drug gangs for a Dublin-based newspaper.

In the search for information about Ms. McKee’s killing, the police released CCTV footage showing her standing in the crowd in Creggan, a heavily Catholic area of Londonderry, on the night she was killed. The video also shows a masked figure leaning in from behind a street corner.

At a vigil in the city on Friday, Ms. McKee’s partner, Sara Canning, spoke of her as “the woman I was planning to grow old with” and said her dreams had been “snuffed out by a single barbaric act,” according to the BBC.

“We are all poorer for the loss of Lyra,” she said.

Colleagues remembered Ms. McKee as an accomplished investigative journalist; in 2016, she was named on a Forbes list of remarkable news media professionals under 30.

She crowdsourced funds for the research of her first book, “Angels With Blue Faces,” an investigation into the killing of a unionist lawmaker by the Provisional Irish Republican Army in 1981. The book was published last year.

Recently, she was working on “The Lost Boys,” about the disappearances of children and young men during the Troubles, as the years of conflict in Northern Ireland are known.

An online fund-raiser to help her family with funeral expenses collected about 47,000 pounds — more than $60,000 — in its first day.

Ms. McKee’s killing was condemned by politicians on both sides of the divide, along with Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain and Prime Minister Leo Varadkar of Ireland.