Police are treating this finding as an “encouraging line of enquiry”.
A gun believed to be of the same type and calibre as the gun used to murder Lyra McKee has been found in Derry.
As part of a search on Saturday evening, police remove a command-wire initiated bomb, a handgun and a quantity of ammunition.
The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) district commander, Chief Superintendent Emma Bond, said that while the finding of this weapon was an “encouraging line of inquiry”, police “cannot definitively say at this time whether or not this is the murder weapon.”
The gun will be subject to extensive forensic testing in the coming days and weeks to determine if there is a link between this firearm and Lyra McKee’s murder.
Bond said: “This operation was designed specifically to find items we believed were being stored by violent dissident republicans in the Ballymagroarty area and which posed a serious and imminent risk to the community.”
Police also said that a strong line of enquiry is that the munitions belong to the New IRA.
McKee was a 29-year-old journalist who was shot dead while reporting on the riots that broke out in Derry in April of 2019.
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