A 29-year-old journalist was shot dead in Northern Ireland on Thursday night in what police called “a terrorist incident.”
Lyra McKee was fatally struck by gunfire at around 11 p.m. during a riot in Derry/Londonderry. She was hit by shots that an unidentified gunman fired at police during the “orchestrated violence,” according to Assistant Chief Constable Mark Hamilton of the Police Service of Northern Ireland.
Officers took McKee to hospital in a back of a Land Rover, but “she died from her injuries,” Hamilton said in a statement Friday. The shooter remained at large.
Friends, colleagues, politicians, readers and other journalists flooded Twitter with tributes to McKee, whose 2014 heartfelt blog post went viral in which she detailed growing up as gay and coming out to her mother.
British Prime Minister Theresa May described McKee’s death as “shocking and truly senseless.”
Seamus Dooley, the Irish secretary of the National Union of Journalists, said McKee was a journalist “of courage, style and integrity.”
McKee’s stories on the fallout from years of violence in Northern Ireland were featured by numerous international news sites, including BuzzFeed.
She inked a two-book deal with publishing house Faber in 2018. Her first, titled “The Lost Boys,” documented the disappearance of children during the Troubles, per a statement released at the time, which described her as a “rising star of investigative journalism.” It was slated for a 2020 release.
She was also an editor for media news website Mediagazer and had hosted a TEDx Talk about the fight for LGBTQ equality.
“Violent dissident republicans” are believed to be behind the violence, said Hamilton, the assistant chief constable. “Our assessment at this time would be that the New IRA is the most likely to be behind this and that forms our primary line of inquiry,” he added.
Violence flared in the Creggan area of the city after police conducted searches for firearms and explosives, following intelligence that attacks were planned over Easter ― which the Belfast Telegraph notes is when “republicans mark the anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising and dissidents are traditionally active.”
Hamilton said a crowd gathered around police at around 9 p.m. “and before long upwards of 50 petrol bombs were thrown at officers. Two vehicles were also hijacked and set on fire.”
Around two hours later, Hamilton continued, about 100 people were in the area, “including young people and members of the media. It was around this time that the gunman fired a number of shots.”