This article is more than 6 years old

This article is more than 6 years old

Police officers escaped injury in a suspected dissident republican bomb attack in Belfast on Friday night.

The Police Service of Northern Ireland confirmed that officers came under attack in the Falls Road around 10pm. A blast bomb type device was thrown at an armoured police Land Rover in the area.

A car belonging to a local family was damaged by shrapnel following the explosion. It is understood that dissident republicans launched the attack from a cemetery on the police patrol.

At the time hundreds of people were attending a punk rock concert at a local leisure centre off the Falls Road headlined by The Damned. The attack came just hours after police confirmed that a booby trap bomb device had been placed under a car in west Belfast earlier on Friday.

The two attacks come after a lull in dissident republican activity in recent months.