A man who was killed in a pipe bomb explosion in Coleraine in County Derry last night has been named as William Campbell. He was aged 19 and was a Protestant.
The man was believed to have been working on the device when it blew up. A police spokesman has dismissed earlier reports that the dead man was found outside a derelict house that was used as a bomb-making factory by Loyalist paramilitaries.
He added that no further devices were discovered in follow up searches in the area. Mr Campbell died in an alley at Winston Way, next to a derelict house.
A number of houses were also evacuated and the area remains sealed off pending a full police investigation. The Mayor of Coleraine, SDLP MLA John Dallat, said that the death of an individual was inevitable given the series of pipebomb attacks in the area over the past number of months carried out by Loyalist paramilitaries.
Close to 100 similar incidents have been recorded in the wider Coleraine area over the past 12 months. The Police Service of Northern Ireland has already drawn up an 8-point plan for the area in a bid to quell the number of incidents.
The explosion followed a number of other violent incidents in the North. In North Belfast, a device containing shrapnel exploded after it was thrown through a window of a house in a Nationalist area.
Police said that a Catholic woman and four children in the house narrowly escaped serious injury in the attack at Manor Street. Police Inspector Gordon Sym said that the family could have been killed.
In County Down, bomb experts carried out two controlled explosions on a pipe bomb that was left outside the home of a police officer in Annalong. In Newtownards, a 39-year-old man was shot in the leg in a paramilitary style attack.
