Irish Republican Army dissidents has claimed responsibility for trying to blow up a passing police patrol near the Northern Ireland border over the weekend.
The claim from the Continuity IRA faction came as US President George W. Bush paid a whistlestop visit to Belfast.
Police confirmed that two officers suffered minor injuries when a bomb hidden under a small rural bridge near the border village of Rosslea, about 160km southwest of Belfast, partly detonated as the police car passed overhead.
The abortive attack happened Saturday, but police did not disclose most details until after the dissidents issued their claim of responsibility.
A police statement said officers and British army experts found "a substantial amount of homemade explosives" that had failed to detonate beneath the bridge. They also found a lengthy "command wire" leading from the bomb to a spot where IRA dissidents hid nearby, triggering the device as the police car passed.
Tom Elliott, a politician from the Ulster Unionist Party, which represents the British Protestant majority in Northern Ireland, said the Continuity IRA hoped to gain maximum attention for its continued existence by timing its statement to coincide with Bush's visit.
"It is their way of getting noticed, their way of demonstrating their opposition to the peace process, and sending a message to the (pro-British) unionist people and indeed the whole world that they have not gone away," Elliott said.
Several splinter groups continue to plot attacks in defiance of the IRA's decisions in 2005 to disarm and renounce violence. The IRA killed 1775 people during a failed 1970-97 campaign to force Northern Ireland out of the United Kingdom. The dissidents' violence has caused little damage and virtually no deaths since 1998, when a car bomb killed 29 people in the town of Omagh -- the deadliest blast from the entire conflict.
However, dissidents have increased their efforts to kill members of the Police Service of Northern Ireland in recent months. Two officers survived being struck with shotgun blasts at close range in November, and a police officer suffered serious wounds to his legs and back when a bomb exploded under his car last month.
