A man in his forties has been arrested in north-east England in connection with the discovery of Semtex explosives and weapons in Belfast at the end of last week.
The Police Service of Northern Ireland said its officers, alongside colleagues from the North East Counter-Terrorism Unit and Northumbria police, detained the 45-year-old in Sunderland on Sunday morning.
The PSNI said the arrest was related to an arms and explosives cache found at a house in the republican Ballymurphy district of west Belfast.
Almost 500g of Semtex was found during the raid on the property on the Ballymurphy Road on Thursday night. The security operation also uncovered two detonators, two handguns and 200 rounds of ammunition. A 38-year-old woman and a 67-year-old man were arrested after the raid.
Semtex, first supplied by Muammar Gaddafi’s regime in Libya to the Provisional IRA (PIRA) in the 80s, was used in high-profile bombings in the early 90s, including of Bishopsgate and Canary Wharf in London.
The discovery of the Semtex will raise questions from unionist politicians about whether the Czech-made explosive came from a cache of the PIRA’s arsenal that was meant to have been decommissioned a decade ago.
The location of the weapons is also significant given Ballymurphy’s history as a republican stronghold during the Troubles. The area was the home of Gerry Adams’s family as well as the district from which many of the PIRA’s most militant fighters in the conflict emerged.
