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DUBLIN — Amid widespread condemnation and anger at the killing of a journalist in Northern Ireland last week, a paramilitary group calling itself the New Irish Republican Army took the unusual step on Tuesday of admitting responsibility for the act and offering its “full and sincere” apologies to her partner, family and friends.
The admission came as the Police Service of Northern Ireland announced that it had arrested a 57-year-old woman in connection with the shooting, which occurred Thursday night in the city of Londonderry. Two teenage men who were arrested on Saturday for questioning were later released without charge.
The journalist, Lyra McKee, 29, died after she was hit by a pistol bullet fired at the police during a riot in the strongly Roman Catholic and nationalist Creggan area of Londonderry, which republicans generally call Derry.
She is believed to be the first journalist killed in the line of work in the United Kingdom since 2001, and her death is seen as a worrying echo of the Troubles of 1968 to 1998, when more than 3,500 people — many, like Ms. McKee, nonaligned civilians — died in violence pitting mainly Catholic republican gunmen seeking a united Ireland against the police, British soldiers and mainly Protestant gangs defending Northern Ireland’s union with Britain.
The New I.R.A. is among the largest and most active of a number of armed groups that splintered from the Provisional I.R.A., the main republican force during the Troubles, after the Provisional I.R.A. accepted the Good Friday peace deal of 1998. Members of the New I.R.A. are suspected of killing two prison officers and of numerous attacks, gunshots and bombings directed at the police, army reserves and government targets, that, often thanks to intelligence warnings, did little or no harm. In January, adherents tried to destroy the main courthouse in Londonderry with a car bomb that caused substantial damage but claimed no lives.
In the New I.R.A.’s statement, issued to a Northern Ireland newspaper, The Irish News, using a recognized code word to authenticate its source, said: “On Thursday night, following an incursion on the Creggan by heavily armed British crown forces which provoked rioting, the I.R.A. deployed our volunteers to engage. We have instructed our volunteers to take the utmost care in future when engaging the enemy, and put in place measures to help ensure this.”
“In the course of attacking the enemy,” the statement continued, “Lyra McKee was tragically killed while standing beside enemy forces. The I.R.A. offer our full and sincere apologies to the partner, family and friends of Lyra McKee for her death.”
The police in Northern Ireland said that Thursday night’s rioting had broken out after its officers entered the Creggan area to search for arms and explosives that the security services believed would be used in an attack to mark the anniversary of the Easter Rising of 1916, an important date in the republican calendar.
After Ms. McKee’s death stoked widespread anger in Londonderry, a group called Saoradh, which speaks for the New I.R.A., said it was canceling a planned Easter commemoration in the city. Its national parade in Dublin went ahead as planned on Saturday, when marching bands and several dozen people in paramilitary uniform marched through the center of the city to a rally at the General Post Office, the headquarters for the republican rebels in the 1916 rising.
The march, one of several routine Easter commemorations, was widely condemned by political leaders and on social media. The Irish prime minister, Leo Varadkar, said the display was “beneath contempt.”
“The right to assemble and march was won by the men and women of 1916 who fought for freedom and the democracy we have today,” Mr. Varadkar said. “This weekend, they dishonored their legacy and memory. It was an insult to the Irish people.”
In Londonderry, opponents of renewed republican violence have made a number of protests in the days since Ms. McKee’s death, altering Real I.R.A. graffiti and painting symbolic bloody red hands on a mural on the side of an office linked to the movement. The words “Not in our name: RIP Lyra” were painted on a mural on the so-called Free Derry Corner, an iconic relic of the struggle with British forces.
As a reflection of the strength of feeling in the community about the shooting, the police said on Monday that they had received more than 140 calls offering information to help the investigation.
Ms. McKee, who grew up in a working-class family in Belfast, was a prominent supporter of gay rights and an acclaimed author and journalist, whose work often probed the legacy of the violence. She was named one of Forbes Magazine’s “30 under 30” influential and rising European media workers in 2016.
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