Police Arrest Suspect in IRA Leader’s KillingA man has been held for questioning by police in Northern Ireland over the shooting death of Tommy Crossan the leading dissident republican in Belfast.
Police said a man, who is 26, was arrested. Crossan was the former lead figure in CIRA, the Continuity IRA. He was gunned down at an industrial complex near a fuel depot on Friday in view of many surrounding homes.
The police said the man arrested was in west Belfast at the Antrim office being questioned.
Three gunmen are suspected of carrying out the killing and detectives are examining a possibility that rival dissidents had been involved in Crossan’s murder.
Crossan was at one time the leader of CIRA’s Belfast unit, but is believed to have had a death threat and was expelled from the same group after there was a falling out a number of years ago.
It was alleged that at one time he was extorting hundreds of thousands of dollars in the name of the organization and then keeping the proceeds.
Suggestions have circulated that Crossan had been an agent with security services from Britain and was killed out of revenge for informing on former comrades in paramilitary, though those claims are used frequently to provide for the justification for carrying out a hit.
Crossan’s killing comes at a time when tensions continue to increase amongst dissident groups of republicans, with fighting continuing to bring problems to the ranks.
Last week a former gunman with CIRA was buried after being shot down outside a daycare center in Dublin in March.
The gunman was blamed for murdering two republican dissidents, Joseph Jones and Eddie Burns, in a dispute involving control of one of the factions.
Crossan spent six years in prison for conspiracy to murder law enforcement officers, after a gun attack in West Belfast at a police station in 1998.
The CIRA split in 1986 from the Provisional IRA and has long been opposed to the peace process. The process largely ended over three decades of brutal violence and helped transform Northern Ireland.
Crossan was gunned down on the day the Good Friday Agreement was signed 16 years ago, which established the sharing of political power between unionists and nationalists at Stormont.
