BELFAST, United Kingdom (AFP) — Police in Northern Ireland said Sunday they suspected dissident Irish republicans could be behind an overnight car bomb attack outside a police station near Belfast, which caused no casualties.

The explosion in Dunmurry, southwest of the Northern Irish capital, occurred after a “gas cylinder-type device” was placed in a delivery driver’s hijacked car and driven to the location, according to police.

It followed a similar attempted bombing on 30 March, when the device failed to explode outside a police station in the nearby town of Lurgan, with paramilitary group the New IRA claiming responsibility for that attack.

So-called dissident republicans are pro-united Ireland individuals and groups who do not accept a landmark 1998 peace deal that largely ended three decades of sectarian conflict known as the “Troubles.”

“There are very many similarities between the two incidents and... our early working hypothesis is that this may well be the work of the New IRA,” deputy chief constable Bobby Singleton of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) told reporters.

Investigators will “keep an open mind” and “it’s still the very early stages of the investigation,” he added.

But it likely showed that “murderous intent and capability” still exists within paramilitaries in the UK territory, he noted.

“Police personnel immediately — and I have to say, extremely courageously, literally running into danger, placing themselves in harm’s way — evacuated nearby homes in order to protect the community,” he said.

The PSNI’s terrorism investigation unit has launched an attempted murder investigation.