(Patrick, don't read!)

Very interesting article from ABCNews.com (NOTE: I was thinking of Cornell
Woolrich's short story, "The Sniper" - about an IRA sniper - during the
shootings, and it looks as if I wasn't so far off the mark!  ):

Oct. 30 — The techniques used by the Beltway sniper to evade capture during
a three-week killing spree in Washington were also employed by a terrorist
death squad in Ireland for as long as five years in the mid-1990s.

Police believe John Allen Muhammad and John Lee Malvo used a 1990 Chevrolet
Caprice modified to hide a sniper's nest in the back seat and trunk, from
which the pair allegedly killed 10 people and wounded three others in the
Washington, D.C., area. The Caprice's back seat folded down, sources told
ABCNEWS, allowing the shooter to lie prone and aim from at least one hole in
the trunk. All the attacks were accomplished with a single shot.

The method is remarkably similar to the tactics of a single-shot sniper who
killed at least nine soldiers and policemen in the troubled Armagh border
area of Northern Ireland starting in 1992.

"There's a striking similarity," said Adam Dolnik, a researcher who studies
patterns in terrorist tactics and motivations at the Monterey Institute of
International Studies.

The slayings ended in April 1997 when police swooped down on a farm and
caught four members of the Provisional IRA, who were later described as a
sniper team. Police believed two of them were the trigger men.

In their possession, they found weapons, radios — and a Mazda 626, which had
a cavity in the rear from which a gunman could crouch and fire.


Fortified Perch

While the IRA sniper squad claimed a lower body count than the Beltway
sniper, they were potentially even more threatening.

The Mazda used by the sniper squad was not only adapted as a firing
platform, but it was, in the provocative language of one British newspaper,
a "provo" tank.

It had been fitted with makeshift armor, to protect the sniper in case of
return fire. The armor, stored in a concealed position, could be hoisted up
behind the rear seats using a rope.

The sniper team also had another car, with a CB radio tuned to the same
channel as the radio in the Mazda, presumably to be used as another spotting
platform.

Police in the U.S. sniper case found a global positioning device, a laptop
computer and a pair of two-way radios in Muhammad's car, according a federal
criminal complaint filed Tuesday.

When the IRA sniper team was caught, the item that drew the most attention
was the powerful Barrett Light .50-caliber sniper rifle the team had.

An American-made weapon specially designed for special operations forces,
the gun weighs nearly 30 pounds, is almost 5 feet long, and fires
6-inch-long bullets that can strike a target from more than a mile away. It
is also extremely loud — police also found ear plugs with the rifle.

Breandan MacSuibhne, a professor of Irish studies at Notre Dame, says the
rifle was never used to its full potential. The sniper squad struck from
only as far as 150 yards away, he said.

The IRA sniper team was found to be in possession of an AK-47, but local
reports at the time pointed out the squad chose to use the Barrett because
it can punch through flak jackets and concrete. It can even be used to
disable vehicles.

When police arrested Muhammad and Malvo, they found a Bushmaster XM-15 rifle
in the car, a commercially available version of the military's M-16. It has
a maximum effective range of 600 yards, only a third of the Barrett's
range — but the duo only used it to a range of 100 yards.

When police in Northern Ireland found the Barrett, they were delighted. It
was in one piece, located in a secret compartment at the bottom of a
trailer. They had feared the rifle would have been dismantled, making it
harder for police to recover it.

When police in Maryland arrested Muhammad and Malvo, some reports said the
Bushmaster rifle had also been hidden within the Caprice. They were also
delighted because the rifle made a direct link between the two men and the
shootings.

The Future of Counter-Terrorism

There has been no sign that the Beltway Sniper was in any way linked to the
IRA, but there have been links between terrorists, even those whose causes
are completely unrelated.

This spring, a House International Relations Committee hearing concluded the
IRA has "well-established links" with terrorists in Colombia since at least
1998. Three Irishmen were arrested in Colombia in August 2001 on suspicion
of training FARC rebels.

And even if the IRA didn't inspire Muhammad and Malvo, law enforcement
experts fear the Beltway sniper will inspire others.

"This sort of thing is more dangerous and harder to fight than someone
driving an airplane into the World Trade Center," said Terry Oden, a
security consultant based in Birmingham, Ala.

Oden, who worked as the secret service attaché in Europe in the 1980s,
recalled the IRA bombings. "Just imagine someone doing this in Dallas, New
York, San Francisco," he said. "It's just scary, scary."

Dolnik was sure the Beltway sniper, owing to media attention, would surely
garner copycats. In the years after the 1971 D.B. Cooper skyjacking, there
were 40 similar attempts, he said — but none of them succeeded.

However, he was confident that al Qaeda would not be one of the copycats.
"They're more of trend-setters than trend-followers," he said.

Meanwhile, Oden said it's too early to see what kind of counter-measures the
sniper attack will inspire — but it's also beside the point.

An increased military presence — putting more personnel in the streets, and
surveillance planes in the sky, like the kind the Washington-area
authorities called on to find the Beltway sniper, might help, he said.

But ultimately, he made that the familiar analogy of likening security
efforts to the war on drugs. "You have to stop it at the source," he said.