LONDON -- A mortar attack was launched Monday against a police station in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, just minutes after the Irish Republican Army's three-day Christmas cease-fire ended at midnight.
A spokesman for the Royal Ulster Constabulary said two people were injured by the blast, which damaged the RUC station in Fintona, a small town 40 miles (65 km) west of Belfast.
The attack was launched from a vehicle parked in a nearby street.
'The mortar was fired into the grounds of the Fintona RUC station and exploded, causing widespread damage to windows and surrounding houses,' the police spokesman said.
The two injured civilians, a man and a woman in their 20s, suffered shock and minor cuts. They were passing by the unoccupied RUC station when the mortar attack was launched without warning.
On Thursday the IRA, which is fighting a militant campaign to end British rule in Northern Ireland, announced a 72-hour hour Christmas cease-fire that was scheduled to end midnight Sunday.
Police said the Fintona attack occurred at 12:15 a.m. Monday.
Nearby residents and local officials expressed dismay that an attack had been launched so close to the passing of the cease-fire deadline.
'We thought that the cease-fire would have lasted longer than this,' Jack Duffy, a local councilmember for the Social Democrat Labor Party, told Sky News Television.
Britain's Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd Monday urged militant Ulster groups to quickly decide whether they were going to accept the Anglo- Irish peace initiative signed in London two weeks ago.
Hurd, speaking to the British Broadcasting Corp., said the peace- seeking pact had put pressure on 'the men of violence of a kind they haven't known for some time.'
The British and Irish governments had updated their attitudes and 'made it perfectly clear that for both of them consent is the key,' he said.
