Schools evacuated in Belfast bomb alert

The alert followed two bomb attacks on law-enforcement targets in the past two weeks that police said were likely carried out by Irish nationalist militants.

A suspicious object described as a "mortar type device" was discovered on waste ground about 500 metres from the rear of New Barnsley police station in the north of the city.

"Those who are behind this attack had very clear and, I believe, murderous intent," Superintendent Emma Bond told reporters as army bomb disposal experts continued to work on defusing the device.

The alert came after police intercepted a van carrying four mortar bombs in Londonderry earlier this month, which authorities said was likely destined for a police station.

Last weekend three police officers escaped injury when a bomb detonated yards from them while they patrolled a coastal path on the outskirts of north Belfast on foot.

A 1998 peace deal largely ended more than three decades of violence in the British-controlled province between mainly Catholic Irish nationalists seeking union with Ireland and predominantly Protestant unionists who want to remain part of the United Kingdom.

But dissident nationalists, who include former operatives who split from the Irish Republican Army after it declared a ceasefire, still stage sporadic gun and bomb attacks.

The threat has intensified in the past four years as frustration with the power-sharing government established under the 1998 peace deal has grown on the fringes of the nationalist community.

(Reporting by Ian Graham; Writing by Conor Humphries; Editing by Roger Atwood)