London  - Shots were fired Thursday over the coffin of a convicted IRA killer in Northern Ireland in what police said was the first blatant display of paramilitarism in a number of years.

Four men, wearing balaclavas and paramilitary uniforms, appeared beside the coffin of John Brady, 40, outside his sister's home in Strabane, in the southern county of Tyrone, and fired a volley of shots in the air, police said.

Brady hanged himself in a police cell last Saturday after being arrested over a domestic dispute while on weekend parole from prison.

He was jailed in 1991 after pleading guilty to murdering a police officer in a bomb attack. He was freed in 1998 under the Northern Ireland Peace Agreement's prisoner release scheme, but was returned to custody five years later after breaking the terms of his release licence.

A former member of the paramilitary Irish Republican Army (IRA), he switched his support to a dissident group which did not agree with the IRA's policy of ending its armed struggle in Northern Ireland.

Reports said between 300 and 400 people gathered outside the house for what was a full scale paramilitary funeral with all the traditional trappings.

A "guard of honour" of some 50 men in white shirts and black ties and trousers lined the route from the house. On the eve of the funeral, four dissident republicans, uniformed and with faces covered by balaclavas, stood guard beside the open coffin inside the house.

While such displays of paramilitary might were usual in Northern Ireland during the 30-year conflict between Catholics and Protestants in the province, it has not been witnessed on this scale for several years, security forces said.

Dissident groups who split from the IRA earlier this year claimed responsibility for the murder of two British soldiers and a policeman in the province.

The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) has repeatedly warned of the heightened terrorist threat from dissident groups.

"We are aware of the incident and inquiries are ongoing," a PSNI spokesman said about Thursday's events.

But relatives of IRA victims were furious. "The propaganda value for dissidents is immense with hundreds of impressionable young men and women from republican areas exposed to this glorification of terrorism," said William Frazer, spokesman for the group Families Acting for Innocent Relatives.

The events were a "symbol of the absolute failure of security in Northern Ireland," said Frazer.  dpa