Belfast, Northern Ireland ? About 300 Irish Republican Army dissidents backed by “a few nutters and idiots” are trying to tear apart the peace process, Northern Ireland’s police commander said Sunday as his detectives interrogated nine people about the killings of two soldiers and a policeman.

Chief Constable Hugh Orde said two dissident groups, the Real IRA and Continuity IRA, were both “very dangerous, like any cornered animal in its death throes.”

Orde said the dissidents had launched at least 25 attacks, chiefly against police, in the past 18 months, leading up to last week’s gun attacks against off-duty, unarmed soldiers outside an army base and against police responding to an emergency call.

The three killings were the first of security forces in Northern Ireland since 1998, the year of the Good Friday peace accord between the British Protestant majority and Irish Catholic minority here that sought to end a three-decade conflict responsible for 3,700 killings.