BELFAST — A young journalist whose work focused on the legacy of the Northern Ireland conflict known as “the troubles” was killed Thursday night during riots in the border city of Londonderry.
Police had been carrying out raids against suspected militant Irish nationalists, and shots fired during the ensuing clashes struck Lyra McKee, 29, of Belfast, authorities said.
Police opened a murder investigation and said they considered the shooting “a terrorist act.”
McKee was the first working journalist to be killed in the United Kingdom since 2001.
Her last tweet on Thursday night showed a photograph of the rioting, with white police vans and black smoke rising in the distance.
“Derry tonight,” she wrote. “Absolute madness.”
While the violence of the Northern Ireland conflict — between pro-British Protestant unionists and Irish Catholic republicans — mostly ended some 20 years ago, with the signing of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, small numbers of opponents known as “dissident republicans” remain.
Many of these dissidents consider Northern Ireland, a part of the United Kingdom, as “occupied territory” and the Police Service of Northern Ireland as an illegitimate force. They reject the peace accord and continue to press — politically, but also with guns and bombs — for a unified Ireland.
The killing of a journalist during a police raid against republican extremists on the eve of Easter celebration shows how volatile the Irish borderlands can still be.
The shooting occurred as police moved into the heavily Irish nationalist neighborhood of Creggan in Londonderry, also known as Derry, on Thursday night.
“We believed that violent dissident republicans were planning attacks in this city, and we were looking for munitions and firearms that we believe may be about to be used across the Easter weekend,” Mark Hamilton, assistant chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, told journalists Friday.
Dissident republicans claimed responsibility for a car bomb that exploded in Londonderry’s city center in January. Police also blame the group for a string of murders and pipe bomb attacks. Members of the so-called “New IRA” are said by police to mingle republican politics with crimes such as drug dealing, prostitution and robbery — making them a kind of hybrid gang-militia.
As police moved into Creggan neighborhood, their vans were struck by gasoline bombs, bricks and fireworks.
“At 11 o’clock last night, a gunman appeared and fired a number of shots towards the police, and a young woman, Lyra McKee, 29 years old, was wounded” and later died, Hamilton said.
“We believe this to be a terrorist act. We believe this has been carried out by violent dissident republicans,” Hamilton said. He charged that “New IRA” members were most likely behind the killing.
A far-left, fringe republican political group called Saoradh issued a statement after the shooting, accusing the police of “waging a campaign of oppression.”
“The inevitable reaction to such an incursion was resistance from the youth of Creggan,” Saoradh said in a statement. “The blame for last night lies squarely at the feet of the British Crown Forces, who sought to grab headlines and engineered confrontation with the community,” it said.
“During this attack on the community, a Republican Volunteer attempted to defend people from the PSNI/RUC,” the statement continued, referring to the Police Service of Northern Ireland and its predecessor, the Royal Ulster Constabulary. “Tragically a young journalist covering the events, Lyra McKee, was killed accidentally while standing behind armed Crown Force personnel and armored vehicles. This outcome is heartbreaking and we extend our sincerest sympathy to the family, friends and loved ones of the deceased.”
Politicians across the spectrum condemned the shooting.
Sinn Fein deputy leader Michelle O’Neill said: “Those people who carried out this attack have no place in society. Those people who carried out this attack do not have any support. Those people who carried out this attack have attacked all of us. They have attacked the community, attacked the people of Derry. They have attacked the peace process, and they have attacked the Good Friday Agreement.”
O’Neill added: “They should disband. They should desist. They have no role in our society.”
Arlene Foster, leader of the pro-British Democratic Unionist Party, said: “It is absolutely heartbreaking. . . . Violence, criminality, terrorism, was always wrong and is still wrong today in 2019. We condemn it wholeheartedly.”
McKee served as an editor for California-based news site Mediagazer, a trade publication covering the media industry, according to her publisher. Her work has appeared in the Atlantic, Mosaic Science and BuzzFeed News. She also wrote a book about the “cold case” IRA killing of Robert Bradford, a politician from south Belfast.
John O’Doherty, director of the Rainbow Project, an advocacy group for LGBT people in Northern Ireland, hailed McKee as “a hero to many in the LGBT community.” McKee used “her own coming-out story to empower others to live as their most authentic selves,” O’Doherty said.
“To lose someone like Lyra at any age is a difficult thing to accept, but to lose her at 29 in such despicable and avoidable circumstances is devastating,” he said.
McKee’s partner, Sara Canning, said during a vigil on Friday afternoon that she had lost “the love of my life and the woman I was planning to grow old with.”
“Our hopes and dreams and all of her amazing potential was snuffed out by a single barbaric act,” Canning said. “This cannot stand.”
There has been concern that Brexit could exacerbate conflict along the Irish border. One of the points of contention in Britain’s exit plan is how to maintain the openness and invisibility of the border once Northern Ireland has left the European Union. The Republic of Ireland will remain an E.U. member.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., was in Londonderry earlier this week, stressing her message to all sides that the turmoil of Brexit should never undermine the protections offered by the U.S.-brokered Good Friday Agreement.
