Former IRA commander gunned down in rare return to violence in Belfast

A former Irish Republican Army commander linked to one of the outlawed group’s most notorious killings was shot dead at close range on a street near his home in Belfast, residents and police said.

No group claimed responsibility for the Tuesday morning killing of Gerard “Jock” Davison, 47, in Belfast’s Markets neighbourhood. It was the first fatal shooting in Northern Ireland in more than a year, and it raised fears of a resumption of violence, but police said they had no evidence of a political motive.

Officers ordered an immediate increase in visible street patrolling, including road checkpoints, to deter what they called a rise in attacks by IRA die-hards in the run-up to Thursday’s United Kingdom general election involving Northern Ireland, which has 18 seats in the House of Commons in London. Small IRA factions who reject their side’s 1997 cease-fire and subsequent efforts to govern Northern Ireland in a spirit of compromise have planted several bombs in the past two weeks, none of which caused significant damage.

But the policeman leading the Davison murder investigation, Detective Chief Inspector Justyn Galloway, said he doubted that an IRA splinter group was responsible. He also dismissed involvement by extremists from Northern Ireland’s British Protestant majority, meaning that his killers more likely had a criminal or personal motive.

“This was a cold-blooded murder carried out in broad daylight in a residential area and it has no place in the new Northern Ireland,” Galloway said.

The relative rarity of Tuesday’s killing underlined how much has changed in Northern Ireland from the bloodiest years of its four-decade conflict that left more than 3,600 dead in a British territory of 1.8 million.

Negotiators delivered a 1998 peace accord that forged a Catholic-Protestant government with the IRA-linked Sinn Fein party at its heart. British troops have been off the streets for nearly a decade, Protestant militants who used to kill Catholic civilians at random in retaliation for IRA attacks have stuck to truces, and the once Protestant-dominated police force has become increasingly Catholic in membership.