Fishery Officers tasked with staming out poaching along the Lifford and Strabane river banks have been attacked with knives, hatchets and breeze blocks.

A Loughs Agency official said a member of his staff could have been killed when a breeze-block was dropped from a bridge onto a patrol boat.

The incident, at Lifford Bridge was one of a number of recent attacks on workers carrying out anti-poaching patrols in the Foyle area.

The agency’s director of conservation and protection, John McCartney, said workers had been assaulted and had stones thrown at them..