Five Bretons arrested over arms cache linked to Real IRA

Five bretons, including a senior town councillor and the chairwoman of a town-twinning committee, were arrested in France yesterday on suspicion of running a support group for the Real IRA.

One person was arrested in the port of Dieppe in Normandy after the discovery of a cache of arms thought to be destined for the diehard Irish nationalist splinter group, which blew up the middle of Omagh in 1998.

The other four, including a right-wing town councillor who helps to run a well-known celtic folk festival and a woman who runs the Guingamp-Shannon town-twinning committee, were arrested in the Côtes d'Armor area of northern Brittany.

All those arrested, three men and two women, were in their fifties and sixties and had no known connections with extremist Breton separatist movements.

Irish police said later that two men in their mid-twenties had been detained in the Dublin area in connection with the same investigation - a joint operation between British, Irish and French security services.

"Surveillance conducted over several months shows these people had direct telephone contacts with people suspected of belonging to the Real IRA. There were comings and goings between France and Ireland," one official said.

Agents of the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST), broadly equivalent to the Special Branch in Britain, found two sub-machine-guns, an automatic pistol, two silencers and several ammunition magazines hidden in a forest at Tourville-sur-Arques near Dieppe. The site had been watched for several weeks and a man was arrested in Dieppe early yesterday morning.

None of the suspects was immediately named. Police said none had a criminal record.

This is the first time that the IRA or one of its offshoots has been suspected of establishing links in Brittany.