Man Held In Shooting At Children’s Hospital

Police arrested a man Saturday in connection with an IRA attack on officers guarding a prominent Protestant politician as he visited his son in a hospital.

A gunman wearing an ill-fitting wig fired at three officers in a corridor of the Royal Belfast Hospital for Sick Children, then escaped with an accomplice late Friday. One bullet hit an officer in the foot, while another struck an empty baby incubator.

The officers were guarding Nigel Dodds, a former Belfast mayor and secretary of Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party, as he visited his 7-year-old son, Andrew.

Police said the Irish Republican Army was targeting the officers, not Dodds.

The suspect, who was not identified, was taken to an interrogation center in east Belfast, where police are allowed to hold him without charges for up to a week.

Andrew Dodds, who suffers from spina bifida, has been in and out of the hospital for months and collapsed last week, requiring surgery. Nigel Dodds several weeks ago requested police protection to visit the hospital, in the heart of Catholic west Belfast, a power base for the IRA and its allied Sinn Fein party.

Dodds said he thought the IRA might have tried to kill him and his wife if the officers hadn’t got in the way.

Friday’s shooting raises the prospect that the IRA’s paramilitary enemies, so-called “loyalist” gangs from Protestant areas, will break their 26-month-old cease-fire. The IRA broke its 1994 cease-fire in February with a one-ton truck bomb in London that killed two civilians.