The Northern Irish police suspect that Republican extremists from the Real Irish Republican Army are behind the explosion of a car bomb in Londonderry. The city is called by republicans Derry. Two arrests have already been made in the case. It concerns two men between the ages of twenty and thirty.

Near a court in the center of the city, a car exploded Saturday night. The police had been warned a quarter of an hour in advance and only had that time to evacuate a lot of people.

The police have released camera images of the explosion. On the video you can see that the car is parked and the suspected driver runs away. In the meantime, a group of passers-by walks along the car before it explodes. No one was injured by the car bomb.

The ‘Real IRA’ or the New IRA has, according to the newspaper The Irish Independent, never made a secret of using the confusion around the Brexit. Republicans want to join Northern Ireland to the republic and unionists want to stay British.

Extremists have used brutal force for years in their struggle. But the bloodshed was stopped in 1998 with a peace agreement. That peace is at risk because of the Brexit. The peace agreement assumes that there is no real border between British Ireland and the rest of the island, but a ‘no-deal Brexit’ makes this an external border of the EU.

The agreements London has made with Brussels provisionally place Northern Ireland in a separate position and closer to the EU than the rest of the Kingdom. Unionists fear that they will belong to Ireland.