BELFAST - Thousands of people joined peace vigils across Northern Ireland Wednesday ahead of the funeral later this week of a policeman whose shooting has threatened the province's hard-won peace.

The murder of Stephen Carroll, along with that of two soldiers 48 hours before, prompted rallies across the troubled British province showing solidarity against the attacks claimed by Republican dissidents.

In Belfast, the streets around City Hall were brought to a standstill as thousands of people gathered for a rally organised by the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU).

"The callous attacks of the last few days were an assault on every citizen who supports peace," Peter Bunting, the ICTU's assistant general secretary, told the crowd.

"(The killers) must be faced down with a massive display of the unity of the people of Northern Ireland," he said on the BBC earlier.

In Craigavon, southwest of Belfast, a candlelit vigil was held to remember Carroll, the 48-year-old police constable who was shot dead there Monday.

At the end of the Lismore Manor estate, just metres away from where Carroll was murdered, members of the local Church of Ireland's Methodist and Roman Catholic congregations gathered together to pray for peace in a joint act of remembrance.

The protests came as Pope Benedict XVI condemned the killings as "abominable acts of terrorism", while political leaders insisted that they would not throw the peace process off course.

Police are still questioning two men, aged 17 and 37, over Carroll's death, while his funeral is set for Friday.

The deadly attacks, the first such incidents in over a decade, have been claimed by two dissident Republican groups.
The Real IRA (Irish Republican Army) said it killed the soldiers at the Massereene barracks northwest of Belfast on Saturday, while Continuity IRA claimed Carroll's killing.

Britain and Ireland have joined the province's political leaders in vowing that the violence will not shake the devolved power-sharing government which has united Protestant and Catholic former foes since 2007.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said that Northern Ireland was currently seeing a degree of unity against the attacks "that some people thought they would never see in their lifetime".

He added that Wednesday's peace marches highlight "the defiance and the determination to stand up to the evil of criminal violence... to say with one voice that the peace that the people of Northern Ireland are building, no murderers should ever be allowed to destroy".

And in Dublin, the Dail (lower house of parliament) unanimously passed an all-party motion "utterly condemning" the murders and affirming the republican groups responsible had "no mandate or support" from the Irish people.

The Continuity IRA and the Real IRA are both splinter groups of the IRA, which has laid down its arms and was the military wing of Catholic socialists Sinn Fein, which now shares power in Northern Ireland with conservative
Protestant former foes the Democratic Unionists.

The Real IRA was behind Northern Ireland's most deadly attack, the 1998 Omagh bombing which killed 29 people.