UBLIN - The retired Canadian general trying to persuade Northern Ireland's rival outlawed groups to disarm has said he expects them to get rid of more weapons, senior British and Irish government officials said yesterday.
They spoke after John de Chastelain, chairman of the disarmament commission, briefed them at Ireland's foreign ministry. De Chastelain, Northern Ireland's disarmament chief since 1997, declined to comment.
Meanwhile, a man was shot last night in north Belfast, where Catholic-Protestant tensions have provoked repeated violence in recent months. Police said at least two attackers opened fire as the man sat in a car parked near a gas station.
An outlawed anti-Catholic group, the Red Hand Defenders, took responsibility for the killing. Police consider the name Red Hand Defenders to be a cover name for members of the Ulster Defense Association, the largest illegal Protestant group, which is supposed to be observing a cease-fire in support of Northern Ireland's 1998 peace accord.
Earlier in Dublin, Britain's Northern Ireland secretary, John Reid, and Irish Foreign Minister Brian Cowen said that de Chastelain had told them he was continuing talks with representatives of the Irish Republican Army, the Ulster Defense Association, and a second armed Protestant group, the Ulster Volunteer Force.
''The general today has told us that he believes further progress can be made to enable the commission to advance towards the completion of its remit,'' Reid said.
The 1998 pact had proposed that the IRA, UDA, and UVF disarm totally by mid-2000.
The IRA, the most elaborately armed and politically sophisticated of the groups, disposed of a secret amount of its weaponry in October. That breakthrough persuaded Protestant politicians to resume a coalition government with Catholics, among them the IRA-linked Sinn Fein party, in a key objective of the 1998 pact.
But the UDA and UVF have yet to surrender any of their weapons stocks, mostly firearms. These so-called loyalist groups have no role in the Northern Ireland government, making it more difficult to apply political pressure on them.
''We understand that there is, and has been, loyalist engagement with the de Chastelain body, but obviously it hasn't been able to report the sort of progress we have seen on the republican paramilitary side,'' Cowen said.
Yesterday, police in Northern Ireland arrested the reputed commander of another outlawed Protestant group, the Loyalist Volunteer Force, as part of an ongoing probe into the 1999 assassination of a high-profile Catholic defense lawyer.
Under British antiterrorist law, the 41-year-old man could be held for up to a week without being charged.
