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By TARIQ PANJA
Dec 20, 2007
Associated Press

LONDON (AP) — A judge on Thursday acquitted the only man charged with murder in Northern Ireland’s deadliest terror attack, the 1998 car bombing that killed 29 people in the town of Omagh.

Judge Reginald Weir, who heard the case without a jury, said he was not convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that Sean Hoey was the bomb-maker behind the attack carried out by the dissident Irish Republican Army group, the Real IRA.

Hoey, 38, was acquitted of more than 50 charges, including murder, conspiracy to murder, causing an explosion and possession of explosive devices.

The Aug. 15, 1998, bomb killed mostly women and children, including an 18-month-old baby and a woman pregnant with twins.

The 500-pound bomb detonated inside a stolen car parked outside a clothes shop on Omagh’s Market Street, less than 30 minutes after the first warning was sent to local media. Confusion created by the warnings led to police inadvertently shepherding victims toward the bomb site.

Prosecutors had tried to tie Hoey to the Omagh bombing and other explosions using DNA evidence. His lawyers claimed the evidence was unreliable.

After the verdict, the victims’ families criticized police for their handling of the investigation.

“I’m very disappointed at the verdict, as are my family,” said Victor Barker, whose 12-year-old son James was among the dead. Barker said the initial investigation was carried out with appalling inefficiency.

Before delivering his verdict, Weir sharply criticized the process of bagging, labeling and recording exhibits. He said police and some forensic experts had “slapdash approach” and “cavalier disregard” for the integrity of forensic items.

Weir said two police officers were dishonest in a deliberate attempt to bolster their statements and that it was impossible for him to accept their evidence.

He said he was not satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that the DNA evidence showed that all explosive devices were made by one person. Hoey faced charges related to 14 other explosions.

Detective Chief Superintendent Norman Baxter of the Police Service of Northern Ireland said his force would study the judge’s verdict and see if there were any lessons to be learned. He said it was a very difficult day for his force, which is likely to come under heavy scrutiny over the ruling.

Hoey was arrested in 2005 following a review of forensic and scientific evidence.

Hoey’s uncle, Colm Murphy, the only other man charged with involvement in the attacks, faces a retrial.

Murphy was convicted and sentenced to 14 years in prison based on telephone records allegedly showing he owned cell phones used by the bombers.

The conviction was overturned on appeal in 2005 when detectives who interrogated Murphy were found to have lied under oath about rewriting their notes of what he said while in custody.

Belfast Telegraph
Thursday 20, December 2007

Bertie Ahern has accused lawyers for the Mahon Tribunal of trying to stitch him up.

The Taoiseach’s lawyers claim the tribunal was today putting together an elaborate fanciful story to discredit Mr. Ahern.

The accusation was made during almost five hours of questioning at Dublin Castle.

Bertie Ahern reacted angrily when lawyers for the tribunal put forward suggestions which appeared to contradict his claim that he received dig-outs from friends in the early nineties.

Mr Ahern rejected their proposed scenario, describing it as ‘unbelievable’.

He told the tribunal “I really don’t believe that you or anybody else would put that together other than to set me up or stitch me up.”

Mr Ahern defended the fact that he didn’t have a bank account during the time he was Minister for Labour and Minister for Finance.

He told the Tribunal that he didn’t consider it unusual to operate in cash in the years after his martial separation.

By Tom Peterkin and Gordon Rayner
Telegraph.co.uk
20/12/2007

Families of the 29 victims of the Omagh bombing have launched a bitter attack on the Police Service of Northern Ireland following the acquittal of the only man to be tried for murder over the 1998 Real IRA attack.

After a nine-year investigation which cost £16million, Sean Hoey, a 38-year-old electrician, was cleared on 56 counts relating to the Omagh bombing and several other attacks on police and military installations.

>>Telegraph TV: Bomb rips apart quiet market town

The trial judge, Mr Justice Weir, accused the police of having a “slapdash approach” to evidence-gathering, which meant DNA evidence presented at the trial could not be relied upon.

He also ordered an investigation into the “reprehensible” conduct of two police officers who were accused of altering their statements to make evidence against Mr Hoey appear stronger.

Victor Barker, whose 12-year-old son James died in the Omagh attack, blamed Sir Ronnie Flanagan, the former chief constable of the then Royal Ulster Constabulary, for the police’s failure to convict anyone of direct involvement in the worst atrocity in the history of the troubles in Northern Ireland.

“It is the appalling inefficiency of Sir Ronnie Flanagan that has meant Chief Superintendent (Norman) Baxter (the officer leading the inquiry) has not been able to secure a conviction,” he said.

By Kevin Connolly
BBC News
20 December 2007

You can write the history of Northern Ireland’s troubles as a litany of the names of small market towns on which terrorist violence conferred a kind of grim immortality.

Twenty-nine people died in the Omagh bombing in August 1998

You may remember some of them - Claudy and Ballykelly, Kingsmills and Enniskillen.

For outsiders of course they fade from the memory as they fade from the headlines.

Only in the hundreds of homes that knew the numb despair of bereavement do they continue to resonate down the years.

Something made Omagh different.

It is almost ten years since the explosion that tore through the shoppers and tourists crowded into the neat little town centre, killing 29 people and injuring hundreds more.

And somehow the case has continued to command our attention, even as Northern Ireland has made the painful transition from conflict in its aftermath.

Dogged family

First of course, there was the sheer scale of the horror. Omagh saw the biggest loss of life in a single bomb blast in 30 years of atrocities in Ireland and on the British mainland.

Then, there have been the court cases of course - one prosecution now on either side of the Irish border, and a civil action planned by the families of the victims against some of the men they accuse of murdering and maiming the people they loved, and continue to love.

And the sheer doggedness of the victims families in keeping the issue of the Omagh attack and the subsequent police investigation in the news shouldn’t be underestimated.

They have become a formidable presence in the life of Northern Ireland, impossible for politicians and senior police officers to ignore. They have acquired skills at lobbying and campaigning that you suspect many of them never wanted, and never knew they had.

But more than anything, for the rest of us, it was the timing of the attack on Omagh which burned it into our memories.

It came just four months after Northern Ireland’s fractious political parties made a political deal which included Sinn Fein, the political wing of the IRA.

It tore apart a community in a province which was beginning to learn to hope after decades of despair - and it made people fear that the new dawn which had promised so much, would be quickly and cruelly extinguished.

Like the other bombings in the early part of 1998 in places like Lisburn and Banbridge, Omagh was a conscious attempt by republicans who disagreed with the political strategy of Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, to destabilise Northern Ireland in that vulnerable moment of hope.

It failed - but there is a terrible irony to the way in which the campaign was halted only by the wave of revulsion triggered by the carnage at Omagh.

So there was intense interest in the prosecution of Sean Gerard Hoey, the only man to face charges of murder in relation to the worst single terrorist atrocity of what we euphemistically call “the troubles”.

So crowded were the public benches that when I glanced up from my seat at one of the press tables I noticed that Sean Hoey’s brother was squeezed in beside the husband of one of the women he was accused of murdering.

Sean Hoey is the only man to face murder charges over the bombing

The legal process was extraordinarily protracted - nine years passed in all from the moment when Sean Hoey’s home was first searched to the moment of acquittal.

The case was heard in a “Diplock” court, that it is to say by a judge, Mr Justice Weir, sitting alone without a jury. The system was introduced in 1972 to counter the possibility that paramilitary organisations would cripple the criminal justice system by intimidating jurors in cases involving their members.

It was once a commonplace sight, but its become much rarer as the age of political violence recedes into history.

Mr Justice Weir spent more than an hour examining the case against Sean Hoey, as the families of both victims and accused listened intently.

He explained that the evidence was mainly scientific - that is to say it was based on conclusions drawn after subjecting fragments of material gathered at the scenes of bomb attacks to forensic analysis.

As we listened, it became clear slowly that the judge was not satisfied with the case. There was strongly worded criticism of how the police had collected, labelled and handled evidence.

‘Beefed up’ statements

There was elegantly expressed scepticism at the extent to which scientists have validated a technique called Low Copy Number DNA - essentially the belief that workable evidence can be gathered from microscopic particles of material.

Above all there was thinly veiled judicial anger that two police witnesses had “beefed up” their statements - had lied, in plain English.

Mr Justice Weir’s words on the subject of LCN DNA were strong enough to suggest that questions will now be asked in other cases working their way through the criminal justice system which rely on the technique.

For the Hoey family of course this was not simply a failure to convict, it was a verdict which acquits a man who in their view, and now in the eyes of the law, was simply not guilty in the first place.

The Omagh families were dignified in defeat, as they have been dignified at every stage of their fight for justice. Their campaigning will go on, but the prospect is surely receding now that anyone will ever be convicted of murdering their husbands and brothers and sisters and wives and children.

As this case fades from our memories it’s worth remembering the victims of all Northern Ireland’s atrocities for whom the pain is not fading even as the province heads into a more hopeful future.

From The Times
December 21, 2007

The search for justice should not be abandoned now

The injury caused by the worst single atrocity in the history of Northern Ireland’s Troubles has been compounded by the insult that, nine years on, no one has been convicted for any substantial part of this crime. The acquittal of Sean Hoey yesterday was not unexpected. Even relatives of the victims had to concede that the forensic science evidence deployed against him had been contaminated to the point where it was effectively inadmissible. Few directed criticism at Mr Justice Reginald Weir, who oversaw his duties doggedly and explained his decision carefully and persuasively. There is no reason to conclude that a conventional jury would have reached a different verdict. It is, instead, the Royal Ulster Constabulary and its former chief constable, Sir Ronnie Flanagan, that finds itself accused of rank incompetence.

Serious mistakes were certainly made but this case should be placed in context. One of the immense frustrations of this tale is that the names of those suspected of involvement in this atrocity have been aired freely across the Province and the Irish Republic from the days after the bombing. This speculation, and legally it is no more than that, has been fuelled by accounts of mobile telephone calls that were intercepted but which were of no value to prosecutors because Britain and Ireland are exceptions in Western Europe in not permitting that material to be allowed in court.

As a consequence, the police have frantically sought other means of securing convictions. The passage of time and, it has to be acknowledged, some slapdash basic policing work, have meant that what would always have been a challenge has become almost a farce in practice. It is a shocking state of affairs when a judge can all but declare that two police officers lied in an effort to make their evidence appear credible. In normal circumstances, an independent review of the police force concerned would be logical. But as the RUC no longer exists, there would be little to be secured today in initiating such an exercise.

This should not, nevertheless, be the end of the story. It is wholly unacceptable that the deaths of 29 people on August 15, 1998, be deemed beyond the reach of the law. There is an overwhelming argument for one final attempt to contact suspects and witnesses again and to look once more at the DNA data and explore whether it could form the basis of a prosecution. If there is to be the slightest prospect of progress, however, then an outside force and not the Police Service of Northern Ireland should take on such an investigation. This would mean more expenditure but this would pale into insignificance compared with the obscene cost of the Bloody Sunday inquiry.

If there is the remotest consolation in this saga it is that it is so firmly of the past, not the future. The Omagh assault was meant to be the “Real” IRA’s call to arms, a warped protest against the mainstream IRA’s willingness to enter the political process. It was intended to rally all dissident republicans to the hardliners’ cause. It failed miserably. Public opinion on each side of the border was revolted by the senseless slaughter. Omagh was thus the Real IRA’s first and last “spectacular”. After nine long years, the political process has reached its fruition. Few in 1998 would have thought it possible that less than a decade later the Rev Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness would preside together over a power-sharing executive. The search for justice for Omagh must continue unabated. The wider pursuit of peace, though, has been won.