Author: xaurav

Police believe a bomb which killed a PSNI officer had already been planted under his car while runners taking part in a half-marathon ran past it.

A picture has been released showing two runners and a five-year-old girl close to where the car was parked two hours before Constable Ronan Kerr died.

Police said the bomb could have killed or maimed anyone in the area.

Two men are still being questioned by police over the murder and about an arms find in County Tyrone.

Constable Kerr, 25, was killed when the device exploded as he drove his car away from his home in Omagh on Saturday.

A 40-year-old man was arrested when a van was stopped near the Beragh turn-off on the Ballygawley line in County Tyrone on Thursday.

A 26-year-old man arrested in Scotland on Wednesday under the Terrorism Act was re-arrested over Mr Kerr’s murder.

Commenting on the threat to people in the area from the bomb, the officer in charge of the investigation, Detective Superintendent Raymond Murray, said: “We already know it was murderous. Now we have evidence that it was potentially indiscriminate.

“This device had the potential to kill or maim anyone who happened to be in the area when Ronan got into his car – whether that was him, two men taking part in a fun run or an innocent five-year-old girl watching the race.”

Detectives investigating the murder are returning to the scene at Omagh’s Highfield estate on Thursday afternoon.

Earlier on Thursday, a house in Dublin was searched in connection with the murder.

The search was carried out by members of the Garda (Irish police) Special Detective Unit at the request of the Police Service of Northern Ireland.

It was at a property on the north side of Dublin, close to the airport.

Weapons and explosives were found in the Coalisland area of County Tyrone on Tuesday evening by police investigating the police officer’s murder.

The arms found were:

• Four Kalashnikov rifles

• Six loaded ammunition magazines

• Timer power units

• Detonators

• Incendiary bombs

• Components for rocket launchers and other explosive devices

• Quantity of explosives, possibly Semtex

BBC NI home affairs correspondent Vincent Kearney said it had been a significant length of time since the police had uncovered an arms haul of this quantity and variety.

He added that if it turned out that the explosives found were Semtex, it would raise questions about whether dissidents had access to a new supply line or whether the explosives formerly belonged to the Provisional IRA.

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

Ex-Labour minister Elliot Morley has admitted dishonestly claiming more than £30,000 in parliamentary expenses, the largest sum of any former MP.

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

A particle accelerator in the US has shown compelling hints of a never-before-seen particle, researchers say.

The find must be more fully confirmed, but researchers at the Tevatron are racing to work through existing data.

If proved, it will be a completely new, unanticipated particle; researchers say it cannot be the much sought-after Higgs boson.

It could also signal a new fundamental force of nature, and the most radical change in physics for decades.

Researchers at the Tevatron formally announced the find on the collaboration’s website, after posting an as-yet unreviewed account of the research on the Arxiv repository.

The team was analysing data from collisions between protons and their anti-matter counterparts antiprotons. In these collisions, particles known as W bosons are produced, along with a pair of “jets” of other particles.

It was in these jets that the unexpected “bump” in the team’s data came to light, potentially representing a particle that the current understanding of the zoo of subatomic particles – the Standard Model – does not include.

“When you look at the data it’s not some disagreement with the Standard Model, it’s a nicely formed bump in the distribution that looks really like the kind of bump you’d get if a new particle was being exchanged in this process,” said Dan Hooper, a theoretical physicist at Fermilab who was not involved in the research.

However, the result is at what is known as the “three-sigma” level of certainty; that means there is still about a tenth of a percent chance that the result is attributable to some statistical fluctuation in the data.

For a formal discovery, the level is traditionally taken to be five-sigma – or about a one-in-a-million chance that the “bump” is just a fluke. However, Dr Hooper said, the result comes from data taken at one of the Tevatron’s two detectors, called CDF and DZero.

“Even without running the machine one more day, they have roughly twice as much data at one of the two experiments, and if you include… DZero, then you have four times as much,” he told BBC News.

That means that confirming the result more fully is simply a matter of working through the numbers the team already have to hand. Further, the coming experimental run at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) should provide even more data to confirm or refute the new particle – whatever it is.

All that is clear is that the bump definitely does not represent the unwitting star of high-energy physics, the Higgs boson – the hunt for which has popularly been pitched as a race between the Tevatron and the LHC.

“If it’s a real effect, rather than a fluctuation or a mismodelling of the background, it would be much more exciting than a standard model Higgs – or any type of Higgs,” said Tony Weidberg, a physicist from Oxford University who works on the LHC’s Atlas instrument.

However, he told BBC News that he did not “find this evidence very convincing”, though he reiterated that a more definitive answer would be soon in coming.

“I’ve been doing this for 30 years now, and every few years we get these three-sigma effects – they come and then they go. Time will tell.”

Dr Hooper is more optimistic on the basis of the current result alone.

“There’s a 0.1% chance that this is a statistical fluke,” he said. “Other than that possibility that lingers, this is the most exciting new phyiscs we’ve learned about in my lifetime.”

If it is in fact true, Dr Hooper believes that the mystery particle represents an undiscovered “fundamental force”.

“We’d essentially be saying there’s a new force of nature being communicated by the particle. We know that there’s four forces: electromagnetism, gravity, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. This would be the fifth; every freshman physics class would have to change their textbooks.”

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.