SAOIRSE32

Jim Gibney
The Thursday Column
Irish News
**Via Newshound
11/09/08

I strongly suspect that there is hardly a person, nationalist or unionist, who believes the DUP’s leadership’s protestations about the existence of the IRA’s Army Council as the reason why it is opposing the transfer of policing and justice powers to the north’s executive.

I strongly suspect that there are few in the leadership of the DUP, including its leader and first minister Peter Robinson, who believe the existence of the IRA’s Army Council is a genuine obstacle to the establishment of a police and justice ministry.

The reality is the leadership of the DUP is being spooked not by republicans but by the by-election result in Dromore, Co Down, when Jim Allister attracted an uncomfortable number of former DUP voters and used these votes, as second preferences, to elect a UUP candidate and defeat the DUP’s candidate.

When Peter Robinson looks in the mirror in the morning before his ministerial car arrives at his door to pick him up it is not Martin McGuinness, Deputy First Minister, he sees over his shoulder, it is Jim Allister.

Allister is challenging the leadership of the DUP not from a solid, assured position but from the sidelines, from the fringes of unionism and he is causing them to lose their nerve.

What other explanation can be offered up for the impasse which currently exists where the executive has not met over the last few months because the DUP are not prepared to seriously address issues like policing, educational reform, rural planning and the location of the proposed new stadium.

What other explanation can be offered up for the DUP standing the high-profile minister Arlene Foster in next week’s by-election in Fermanagh – an election campaign in which Jim Allister has no candidate but which is still haunted by his spectre.

But Allister is not the only factor at work inside the leadership of the DUP – there is the Paisley factor, that is, the absence of Ian Paisley senior.

The internal ramifications of his departure as leader and the manner in which he was deposed continue to play out inside the DUP.

There is no obvious threat to Peter Robinson as leader but those in the DUP opposed to power sharing, to partnership government with Sinn Fein, are flexing their muscles and trying to limit or slow down the process of change which would arise from, for example, the transfer of police and justice powers.

The self-styled ‘twelve apostles’ who flirted with the idea of blocking Paisley senior’s decision to enter government with Sinn Fein, until he firmly showed them the door, remain a negative force inside the DUP.

They are the Allister wing inside the DUP and it is to them and that section of recalcitrant unionism that Allister speaks and pitches his ‘not an inch’ brand of unionism.

Peter Robinson is clearly finding it difficult to manage these various tensions in his party and inside the unionist community.

When he was deputy leader he was instrumental in moving the DUP into government with Sinn Fein and to accepting the all-Ireland institutions.

He adroitly used Paisley senior’s persona and the power which accompanied it to help create the new, remarkable and popular dispensation that we have today.

In doing so many inside the DUP were forced into a position they resented: accepting equality with nationalists as the basis for the new society which is slowly taking shape across this island.

The leadership that Peter Robinson displayed in convincing Paisley senior to enter government with Sinn Fein; his succession as DUP leader; his welcoming Taoiseach Brian Cowen to his east Belfast constituency, all reflect a man who has the required qualities to lead unionists into a new future.

He should revisit David Trimble’s tenure when leader of the Ulster Unionist Party and learn the lessons from that period.

Jeffrey Donaldson was to Trimble what Jim Allister could become to Robinson; Trimble made the mistake of pandering to Donaldson and ended up paralysed.

Allister will wither on the vine of political progress, just as Bob McCartney did, or he will prosper on the politics of hesitancy and uncertainty.

Allister’s demise is in Robinson’s hands. His choice is obvious: partnership with Sinn Fein.

Irish News
**Via Newshound
12/09/08

IN MAY 1991 James Martin, Veronica Ryan and their son Liam pleaded guilty to allowing Sandy Lynch to be falsely imprisoned in their home on the Lenadoon estate in west Belfast.

James Martin was jailed for five years while Veronica Ryan was imprisoned for three.

Liam Martin received a six-month suspended jail term.

But in April this year the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) took the unusual step of asking the Martins if they wanted their convictions to be referred back to the Court of Appeal.

Normally it is the person who has suffered the alleged miscarriage of justice who asks the CCRC to investigate their case.

Another unique aspect of the case is the CCRC’s refusal to inform Danny Morrison or any of his co-accused why their convictions have been sent back to the appeal court.

It has refused to confirm if it is connected to British intelligence efforts to protect Freddie Scappaticci being identified as an informer.

The CCRC said: “The nature of the reasons for the referrals means that the commission has been unable to inform the applicants or their representatives why these cases have been referred.

“It will be for the Northern Ireland Court of Appeal to make any further decisions on disclosure.

“Their appeals relate to material which, it is alleged, was not properly disclosed to the defence at their original trial.”

The Morrison/Lynch trial has already made legal history.

In 1996 the European Court of Human Rights declared that one of those accused, Anto Murray, had had his human rights violated when he was refused access to a solicitor for 48 hours during questioning.

As a result then British home secretary Jack Straw was forced to change UK law.

Could a coded message intercepted by intelligence have prevented the biggest atrocity of the Irish Troubles, in which 29 people died? Despite two trials, and millions of pounds spent, still no one is in prison for the Omagh bombing. In a special investigation, John Ware asks why covert monitoring failed – and why this and other pieces of evidence were not passed on to police hunting the killers

Emergency teams survey the devastation left by the Omagh bombing, which killed 29 people and two unborn babies (Photo: PA)

By John Ware
Telegraph.co.uk
13 Sep 2008

A twisted baby buggy; corpses laid out in a side street; crimson patches seeping through the makeshift shrouds taken from a dry cleaner; charred and shrapnel-scored lumps of flesh; water cascading down the street from a burst main mingling with the blood of the dead and those mutilated souls still clinging to life.

That was the scene which confronted detectives in Omagh on the afternoon of August 15, 1998. Twenty-nine men, women and children and two unborn babies died in the Real IRA’s horrible massacre.

If ever there was a case when the criminal justice system needed to triumph over evil, Omagh is it. But there has been no justice and no triumph over evil: not a single person is in prison for any offence connected with the bombing. And yet it could all have been very different. Not only might the bombers have been caught and punished. It is possible the bomb itself could have been prevented.

GCHQ, the Government’s organisation for intercepting electronic communications, was monitoring the conversations that the bombers had during the 90 minutes it took them to take the bomb from the Irish Republic to Omagh. There are transcripts of some of the bombers’ snatched conversations as they transported their murderous cargo. And yet the information was not successfully exploited. It was not used to stop the bombing, and it was not used to help detectives bring the perpetrators to trial.

The GCHQ monitoring was done at the behest of the then head of Special Branch, South Region. Two weeks before the Omagh outrage, the dissident Republicans of the Real IRA came very close to murdering dozens of people in Banbridge, Co Down. A car bomb planted by the group destroyed part of the town centre. The warning was late because the bombers had tried to phone the Irish News, a Belfast daily, on a Saturday, the one day of the week its switchboard was closed.

The Banbridge bomb was the latest in a series of increasingly reckless attacks perpetrated by Republicans opposed to the peace process. For months, Special Branch had been trying to build a picture of who was involved, and they had secured funds for a huge telephone interception operation.

But the bombers were launching their raids from the Irish Republic, and Special Branch’s ability to intercept their phones stopped at the border. So the Branch sought the help of GCHQ.

A few weeks before the Banbridge bomb, Special Branch had discovered a “nugget”: a mobile telephone number belonging to one of the bombers. They passed it to GCHQ. As the car with the bomb inside it was being parked in the centre of Banbridge, GCHQ was monitoring. A coded message from one of the bombers was recorded: “The bricks are in the wall.” That was the signal that it was time to make the telephone warnings. The number of “bricks” was also mentioned, indicating the time left to detonation.

Because the head of Special Branch South feared another car bomb attack after Banbridge was imminent, he is “adamant” that he asked GCHQ to continue “live” tactical monitoring of that phone. He hoped that, as a result, GCHQ could locate the target mobile the next time it crossed the border, which would be an indication that it was being used to organise another bomb.

On August 14, the day before Omagh, the Royal Ulster Constabulary received an alert from the Garda Síochána that some sort of terrorist device was to be moved across the border imminently. Special Branch assessed this as another car bomb.

Ray White, former assistant chief constable who has been in charge of both CID and Special Branch, has told me there was a “unit stood by” to disrupt and interdict the bombers if GCHQ got a fix on the mobile. Phone logs show that at 12.41pm on the day of the Omagh bombing, the bombers began to use their mobiles. The initial call lasted just 14 seconds – the first of nine coded exchanges between the scout car and the bomb car. This was a classic configuration for a bomb run: there were two cars, a scout car moving in the same direction but ahead of the car carrying the bomb.

Why did GCHQ not react immediately? It is possible that no one was listening; the conversations could have been recorded automatically. “Live” monitoring was, however, specifically what Special Branch sources say they had asked for and expected. Given the Gardai warning and risk of another incident like the bomb in Banbridge, this qualified as a “Priority One” (threat to life) investigation.

The bomb began its final journey near the Co Monaghan border. Recognising what was happening as a bomb-run was made more difficult for GCHQ’s monitors (supposing that they were listening “live”) by the fact that the mobiles used by the bombers in the scout car and the bomb car itself were registered to Eircell, a mobile provider then owned by the Irish government. GCHQ needed to crack their coded electronic signatures in order to listen and track the phones. This is most efficiently done with the assistance of the mobile network provider; the signature includes a complex mathematical algorithm in the hardware of the phone. Mobile manufacturers are required to give the algorithm of each new model to the Government, which passes it on to GCHQ.

But it seems highly unlikely that Eircell was party to that arrangement. Irish security sources have made it clear that although they often worked closely with MI5, they had no relationship with GCHQ.

GCHQ is thought to have cracked only the electronic signature for the mobile in the scout car. This mobile had previously crossed into the United Kingdom when it was used to co-ordinate the Banbridge bombing. Having decrypted the mobile, GCHQ could listen to it when it returned to the Irish Republic. But GCHQ is not thought to have had the signature for the mobile in the bomb car.

GCHQ may therefore only have seen one vehicle – the scout car – moving from mast to mast along the southern side of the border. On the morning of August 15, 1998, that car was moving away from the North-South corridor where previous car bombings had been targeted. That fact, and the short coded messages, may explain why it failed to alert anyone at GCHQ.

And yet there were clear indications that a bomb run was under way. At 12.50pm, the mobile in the scout car received a 23-second call from a phone box 100 yards inside the Northern Irish border. The voice should have been familiar: it had been recorded three weeks earlier during a mortar attack in Newry. It was assessed then as belonging to a man identified as the “Officer Commanding” one of the dissident units that had been carrying out the bombings.

He checked a series of switchboards to see if they were operating to take later warning calls. First, he called the Irish News – the same paper that had been contacted before the Banbridge bombing. Next, he called the Samaritans. Then he phoned the scout car, presumably to tell them all was well. His final call was to Ulster Television in Belfast.

At 1.30pm, phone logs show the scout car crossed the border in Northern Ireland around Aughnacloy. The words “We’re crossing the line” were picked up by GCHQ.

As both mobiles crossed the border, they went over to the British-owned network Vodafone, on which GCHQ can monitor and track calls. So instead of just one mobile inching north on the screen of the GCHQ monitors, there would now have been two.

The furthest the bombers had struck into Northern Ireland before was Lisburn, Co Antrim, about 40 minutes from the border. Once clear of the border at Aughnacloy, there were now realistically only two targets within 40 minutes’ drive: Dungannon or Omagh.

If GCHQ’s monitoring was “live”, as Special Branch had requested, then by this late stage, it should have been clear that there was a serious possibility that they were listening to a bomb run. Had they alerted Special Branch, it could have made all the difference: there are few routes in and out of Omagh, and these could have been blocked by checkpoints.

But nothing was passed on to the police. By 2.10pm, it was too late: according to the phone logs, the bomb car was inside the town.

Around 2.20pm, GCHQ once again recorded the words that had been the prelude to the bomb in Banbridge: “The bricks are in the wall.” The bomb was armed and the clock ticking.

Anyone listening should by now have been in no doubt about what was going to happen. Forty-four minutes later, the bomb exploded.

GCHQ’s monitoring had failed to prevent the massacre. But the conversations it had recorded were nevertheless a treasure trove of information for detectives trying to identify and arrest the people responsible for mass murder. With voices come telephone numbers, and with numbers come the names of their subscribers. That critical information was not, however, passed on to the detectives investigating Omagh.

One of the first names featured in the intercepts is understood to have been “Seamus”. At 3.30pm, the target mobile in the scout car called an accountant in Kilkenny. The voice was immediately recognised as that of Seamus Daly, a 28-year-old labourer and scrap dealer. Daly sometimes lived with his parents in a ramshackle farmhouse in the hamlet of Cullaville, a mile south of the border.

Eight years ago, in the first Panorama programme I made on Omagh, I named Daly as one of the bombers. I confronted him on his farm. He refused to make any comment. Daly has recently been identified as one of the bombers in a civil suit for damages brought by the relatives of those who died in the Omagh explosion. He has not appeared at the court proceedings now taking place in both Dublin and Belfast, and has declined to answer any questions in person.

At 4pm on August 15, 1998, news bulletins described the scenes of carnage. Police believe that Daly was conducting an urgent post-mortem into the bombing: what had gone wrong with the warnings? At 50 seconds past 4pm, the mobile Daly had been using was active again; it was active again 90 seconds after that call ended. At 5.23pm, the mobile was used to call a Daly associate.

Daly had borrowed the mobiles in both the scout car and the bomb car. He held on to those phones until the day after the bombing. Had the detectives been through the doors of Daly’s house within the first few days of the bombing, they might well have found vital evidence: phone numbers, written messages or clothing linked to the vehicles used.

It did not happen. If GCHQ was still listening, the detectives never received this vital information. Why not?

The route by which intelligence is passed to detectives investigating crime is through Special Branch. One well-placed source is categorical that the GCHQ intercepts were with Special Branch “within five to six hours” of the bombing. There was also an assessment of the identities of those who had been using the phones.

But the then head of Special Branch has insisted that he had no knowledge of the GCHQ intercepts until he was telephoned three to four days after the bomb by the officer who commissioned them. That officer had chased up GCHQ and asked them: “What happened? Why am I only getting this now?” He says GCHQ’s answer was: “‘We missed it.’”

The blunt truth is, none of the accounts about who got what and when tally.

The then head of Special Branch had insisted that the senior investigating officer be given “the hot verbal” immediately, and Special Branch sources say this was done 24 hours later. However, the CID log records no substantive briefing until three weeks later. All the detective received were some names. Special Branch sources say this was “sanitised” by GCHQ, not them.

The detectives were left to work out that the bombers had used mobiles for themselves. For months they trawled through phone records – 6.4 million of them – trying to identify the mobiles used. Eventually, this “cell site” analysis showed 22 suspects’ phones active in Omagh and four other bombings linked to it. Although this was evidence that pointed to the fact that the mobiles had been in Omagh when the bomb was planted, prosecutors needed proof of who had been using them to bring murder charges.

GCHQ had this in the form of voice recordings. But the detectives were not given them, or even informed that they existed. Off the record, ex-Special Branch sources say they were heavily restricted by GCHQ in what they could disclose to the detectives. When I asked the Police Service of Nothern Ireland (PSNI) if this was correct, I was told that no one from the PSNI could discuss “specific questions about intelligence issues because to do so would be a breach of the law and PSNI policy”.

GCHQ’s recordings could not, of course, be used in court: British law rules all such evidence inadmissable. But there was no law to stop the GCHQ material from being shared with the detectives as they laboured month after month to try to identity the mobiles used – some of those mobiles whose numbers, owners and users were known all along to GCHQ, MI5 and presumably Special Branch.

By the time detectives had completed their own laborious analysis, it was June 1999. Nine months had passed since the bombing and the trail was going cold.

It is difficult to believe GCHQ did not gain a lot more useful material after Omagh. After the bombing, as former assistant commissioner White put it to me, “the blame game would have been going on [among the bombers]: ‘Did you put the car in the right place? Was the right message passed over?’ People would possibly have been discussing alibis and asking: ‘Who is the weak link in the chain here? Who, if they are arrested, is likely to break?’.”

GCHQ cannot have stopped listening to the Omagh mobiles or mapping the matrix of co-conspirators those mobiles were talking to. But once again, nothing that they had garnered has been shared with the detectives.

Why this blanket secrecy? That remains the most perplexing question. It has been suggested to me by senior police sources that the intelligence services decided that it was more important to ensure that the details of GCHQ’s technology and methodology were kept secret than to risk the possibility that they might be compromised by sharing some of their fruits with detectives investigating the Omagh bomb.

Many will find that answer unsatisfactory. Twenty-nine people and two unborn babies were murdered by the Omagh bomb. What is intelligence for if it is not to help put the perpetrators of such an outrage behind bars?

The Government has refused to discuss any aspect of this matter with me. Secrecy still runs through the bones of Sir Joe Pilling, permanent secretary at the Northern Ireland Office when the Omagh massacre took place. When I asked Sir Joe if the GCHQ intercepts “rang any bells”, he responded: “I could say I’m not commenting, and then you’d think it might have rung bells,” he answered. “So I’m not inclined to say whether it rings bells or not. I like to be helpful but in the area you are in, I can stick to the proprieties easily. I’m not playing. Sorry.”

But the truth about what GCHQ did or did not know about the Omagh bombers is no game – least of all to the relatives and mutilated survivors. Sir Joe’s answer reminds us that there are times when Britain can still seem a quite preposterous country.

John Ware is a reporter for BBC current affairs. His ‘Panorama’ programme, ‘Omagh - What The Police Were Never Told’, will be broadcast on Monday 15 September on BBC1 at 8.30pm

New evidence has emerged that the Omagh bombing could have been prevented by British security forces.

Market Street, Omagh, in the aftermath of the bombing (Photo: AP)

By Alasdair Palmer
Telegraph.co.uk
13 Sep 2008

GCHQ, Britain’s secret organisation for the interception of electronic communications, recorded conversations between the bombers on their mobile phones as they made their way towards the town to plant their device.

The BBC’s Panorama programme has established that the calls contained enough clues to raise the alarm that a major operation was under way. If GCHQ had been actively monitoring the calls live – as Special Branch says it had requested – it is possible the attack could have been stopped.

The intercepts could also have played a crucial role in bringing the bombers to justice after the attack, but sources told Panorama that not one of the transcripts was ever disclosed to the investigating police.The bombing, on Aug 15, 1998, was carried out by the Real IRA, a dissident group opposed to the peace process.

Twenty-nine people and two unborn children died in what was the largest single attack of the Troubles. The BBC investigation found that GCHQ intercepted the terrorists’ mobile phone calls on the day they planted the bomb. What is not clear is whether GCHQ’s monitoring staff were listening to the exchanges as they happened – or whether the conversations were recorded automatically, without anyone listening.

Ray White, a former assistant chief constable of the Northern Ireland Police Service, told the BBC that the Special Branch officer responsible for requesting GCHQ’s assistance was “adamant” he had asked for “live” monitoring “primarily for the purpose of triggering a pre-arranged surveillance plan” to stop an attack.

The programme, presented by the reporter John Ware and to be broadcast tomorrow night, says that if GCHQ’s officers were listening, there were clues in the exchanges they intercepted which should have made them realise they were hearing the prelude to a terror attack. Among other signs, GCHQ recorded the bombers as they received a call from a known Real IRA commander who was suspected of involvement in a string of terrorist attacks.

One senior source said that transcripts were sent to Special Branch in Belfast “within hours” of the bombing. Special Branch sources, however, say they were not briefed until three to four days after the attack. The Special Branch sources say that, within 24 hours of their meeting with GCHQ, they gave a verbal briefing to a senior police

officer investigating the mass murder, giving information “sanitised” by GCHQ. But there is no record in the CID log of a substantial briefing from Special Branch until three and a half weeks after the blast.

Even then, the detectives received the names of only some main suspects. They did not get any of the details they needed to help build a case against those suspects. Facts as basic as that the bombers had used mobile phones and that GCHQ had their numbers and recorded their calls, were withheld.

As a consequence, the detectives trying to identify the terrorists spent nine months trawling 6.4 million phone records, to identify 22 suspects’ phones used to plan Omagh and four other bombings. Although that laborious effort proved which mobiles had been used for Omagh, investigators needed evidence of exactly who had been using those phones at the time of the attack before they could prosecute. They did not have that evidence.

But, claims Mr Ware, GCHQ had recordings that could have been used to identify at least one of the voices of the men in the two cars used to plant the bomb. GCHQ’s recordings would not have been admissible as evidence in court, but had the information they contained been passed on within hours, or even days, of the attack, it might well have led detectives to other evidence that could have been used to convict the perpetrators.

In response to Panorama’s findings, Michael Gallagher, the chairman of Omagh Support and Self Help Group, told Mr Ware: “We have been demanding a public inquiry since 2002 into the abysmal failure of the police inquiries. In all conscience the Government can no longer resist this.” Neither the Government nor GCHQ will confirm or deny the monitoring operation.

Loyalist terrorist finds refuge in Republic after eluding raids by the police

Henry McDonald, Ireland editor
The Observer
Sunday September 14 2008

The loyalist terrorist who police suspect pulled the trigger in the murder of journalist Martin O’Hagan has fled to a safe house in the Irish Republic to avoid a series of raids on his home last week.

The Police Service of Northern Ireland’s chief suspect in the 2001 murder managed to elude detectives who carried out a number of search and arrest operations in Northern Ireland last week related to the O’Hagan killing, The Observer has learnt.

It has also emerged this weekend that at least one of the five people still being questioned by police in connection with the O’Hagan murder has been moved into protective custody.

Four men and one woman were arrested last week and remain in custody over the weekend. They include a husband and wife from Mid Ulster.

The searches and arrests were carried out by a new police unit which has been given powers to re-investigate murders committed between June 1998 and June 2004.

The Retrospective Murder Review Team is headed by Supt Alan Skelton and Dt Chief Brian Murphy. Their brief includes re-examining many unsolved paramilitary-related killings, including that of the Sunday World reporter.

Skelton and Murphy reopened the O’Hagan murder file last year.

The journalist, who was 51, was shot dead in front of his wife on 28 September, 2001, as they walked home from a pub in the centre of Lurgan, Co Armagh. Detectives investigating the case believe O’Hagan’s killers had been tipped off by a phone call from the bar that he and his wife were leaving for home. O’Hagan was gunned down close to the loyalist Mourneview estate. The Loyalist Volunteer Force was blamed for the journalist’s killing. O’Hagan had a reputation for breaking stories about loyalists and their criminal enterprises, particularly in the Mid Ulster and North Armagh area where he came from.

He was the second journalist in Ireland to be murdered in just under a decade. Five years earlier a Dublin crime gang shot dead Sunday Independent reporter Veronica Guerin. So far no one has been charged or convicted over O’Hagan’s murder.

Last night security sources in Northern Ireland said their main suspect had fled the Province to the Irish Republic. ‘This guy has long-standing connections with criminals in the south and wouldn’t find it hard to get a safe house down there,’ one source told The Observer.

‘He got wind of the operation and despite his house being hit a number of times there was no sign of him last week.’

He said that their chief suspect had recently returned from Mexico, where he had been on holiday.

The LVF gunman also has a car business in the Netherlands, where he spent most of this year, and close ties to southern Irish criminals operating in Amsterdam, the source added.

The Lurgan-born LVF terrorist and former associate of the murdered loyalist leader Billy ‘King Rat’ Wright was first arrested by detectives six years ago and questioned about the murder of O’Hagan.

A number of human rights organisations, along with the National Union of Journalists, have raised concerns about the failure to prosecute anyone over the O’Hagan killing.

The Mid Ulster LVF was notorious for being full of police and MI5 informers, even though some state agents were involved in crimes including murder.

BBC
14 Sept 2008

Ten years after 29 people and two unborn babies were killed in the Omagh bombing, no-one is in jail for the attack.

The BBC’s Panorama programme has learnt that the UK’s electronic intelligence agency GCHQ was monitoring exchanges between the bombers that day.

Here Panorama reporter John Ware explains why the GCHQ intercepts were not passed to detectives and how they may have helped.

Over 10 years there have been two police inquiries into the Omagh bombing costing many millions of pounds. The key suspects are well known. Why aren’t any of them in jail?

The biggest complication facing Criminal Investigation Department (CID) officers in what was then the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) was the fact that though the bombing was committed in their jurisdiction, 80% of the suspects lived in the Irish Republic, thus falling under the jurisdiction of the Republic’s police force, the Garda Siochana.

Both police forces were governed by different rules and laws.

Despite frequent assurances from the UK and Irish governments that the police forces were co-operating to such an unprecedented extent that there was, in effect, a joint inquiry, in reality there were two separate and parallel inquiries.

An internal review by the RUC and later by the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland said there were serious flaws in the gathering and processing of evidence with leads not being followed up.

That being said, RUC detectives did manage to identify the mobiles that had been used in the planning and execution of the attack, and four other linked bombings, through “cell site” analysis of 6.4 million calls - which was widely regarded as a ground breaking piece of work.

However, although this proved which mobiles had been used and where (for example when the bomb car was being parked in Omagh) it did not prove who had been using them. Unknown to the detectives some of this evidence lay within the UK’s electronic intelligence agency GCHQ, in the form of voice recordings obtained through interception, both by GCHQ and the Special Branch.

Why couldn’t the intercepts be used as evidence in court against the bombers?

There was - and is - a blanket ban on the use of intercepts as evidence in the UK.

In 2003 the then Prime Minister Tony Blair ordered a review to see if lifting the ban might secure more convictions of organised criminals and terrorists but the government concluded that “it was not the right time to change the law”.

Intercept evidence is used in the courts of most other Western democracies such as Canada, Australia and the US, where it has put mafia mobsters behind bars.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown has now agreed to the limited use of intercepts being used as evidence, but intelligence agencies like GCHQ will still be allowed a veto. So in practice not much may change.

Sir Ronnie Flanagan, RUC Chief Constable at the time of the Omagh bombing, told the BBC he knew nothing about the GCHQ intercepts. Now Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Constabulary, he says he has always been a supporter of lifting the ban.

Police officers or government officials are not supposed to disclose any details of an intercept.

But there was nothing in law to stop the details of GCHQ’s intercepts from having been shared with the CID to help them develop evidential leads.

What difference would it have made if the intercepts had been shared with the CID?

Detectives talk about the “golden hours” in the immediate aftermath of a crime. This period offers the best opportunity of gathering evidence against criminals who may not yet have been able to dispose of weapons, clothing and equipment containing DNA, fibres and other forensic leads.

In the case of the Omagh bombing, had the mobile numbers used and the names of those believed to have been using them been disclosed immediately to the CID, the suspects’ homes could have been raided and phones and clothes recovered for forensic testing, which may have linked them to cars used in the bombing.

Intercepts could also have helped the detectives carry out more effective interrogations. There is nothing more unsettling for a suspect than knowing that the interrogator knows the score; and nothing more undermining for the interrogator than when the suspect knows he is fishing.

Transcripts of interrogations with suspects show detectives casting their net wide. Without being briefed about what was in the transcripts, they had little to go on.

Some detectives believe that had they been entrusted with this information they might have secured some admissions, because emotions were so highly charged by the scale of the carnage.

Why was intelligence not shared with the detectives immediately ?

This remains the most perplexing question. Senior police sources believe the most likely explanation is a fear that details of GCHQ’s secret technology and methodology would seep into the evidential chain if too much was shared with the CID and that this posed an unacceptable risk to the strategic capability of the UK’s intelligence agencies.

It is also not clear who got what and when. One well informed source insists that the GCHQ material was available to the Special Branch within six hours of the bombing.

Special Branch sources have categorically denied this, insisting they were only given the details three to four days after the bombing.

However, the CID log records that detectives did not get names until three and a half weeks after the bombing. But this was of little use to them because they got no other details on which they could build a case - not even the fact that the bombers had been using mobiles.

Special Branch sources say they were heavily restricted by GCHQ in what they could disclose to the detectives.

Is the failure to share intercept evidence the only reason no-one has been convicted?

Who can say?

Whilst the detectives have been criticised for not following up all of the leads, we will never know if they had, whether this would have led to charges.

The bombers were ex-members of the Provisional IRA, or Provos, who had left in protest at their leaders signing up to the Northern Ireland peace process.

Although Provo leaders condemned the bombing, they never encouraged their members who might have had evidence against the bombers to come forward with witness statements to the Garda Siochana or the RUC, now the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI).

What happens now?

The Omagh families are suing five individuals who they say were responsible for the deaths of their relatives in the civil courts in Belfast.

The five, all of whom deny any involvement in the explosion, are: Michael McKevitt, currently in jail in the Irish Republic for directing terrorism; Liam Campbell; Seamus McKenna; Seamus Daly and Colm Murphy, who is also facing a retrial after his 2005 conviction for conspiring to cause the Omagh bomb was overturned.

Lawyers for the families say they will seek discovery of the GCHQ material through the courts.

They have renewed their calls for a public inquiry.

BBC
13 Sept 2008

The UK’s electronic intelligence agency GCHQ recorded mobile phone exchanges between the Omagh bombers on the day of the attack, the BBC has learned.

The BBC’s Panorama says the calls were monitored as the bombers drove the car bomb into the County Tyrone town.

It raises new questions about whether the blast, which killed 29 people and unborn twins, could have been prevented or the culprits brought to justice.

The attack on 15 August 1998 was the worst single atrocity of the Troubles.

The 500lb (227kg) bomb was planted by members of the Real IRA - renegade IRA members opposed to the Northern Ireland peace process.

Despite police inquiries on both sides of the Irish border over the last 10 years, at the cost of tens of millions of pounds, none of the bombers are in jail.

Well-placed sources told Panorama that GCHQ was monitoring the bombers’ phones that day, a claim confirmed by Ray White, former assistant chief constable in charge of crime and Special Branch for the Northern Ireland police service.

Whether GCHQ could have helped stop the bombing comes down to whether they were listening to live exchanges between the bombers, allowing them to respond to events, or whether they were simply recording the conversations.

Interception plan

Mr White told Panorama that the Special Branch officer responsible for requesting GCHQ’s assistance was “adamant” he had asked for live monitoring.

He said the officer did this “primarily for the purpose of triggering a pre-arranged surveillance plan” to interdict the bombers.

Some weeks before Omagh was attacked, the Special Branch was given a mobile phone number being used by bombers operating mainly from the Irish Republic. That number was passed to GCHQ for monitoring.

Special Branch officers say they asked GCHQ for live monitoring of the calls

Two weeks before the Omagh bomb, the town of Banbridge in County Down was devastated by a similar car bomb attack, in which 38 people were injured.

In the minutes running up to the Banbridge attack, GCHQ recorded a phone exchange between the bombers, including the phrase “the bricks are in the wall” - a code meaning that the car bomb had been parked and the device armed.

Phone billing records show the Omagh bomb run began in Castleblaney in the Irish Republic at around 12.40 on 15 August, with two mobiles having a 14-second exchange - the first of nine such exchanges both before and after the bombing.

One mobile was in the scout car which was checking the road ahead was clear, the other in the bomb car.

Coded message

As Panorama reports, if intelligence officers were listening there were clues in the conversations, which though coded, could have acted as warnings.

At one point the scout mobile was called from a telephone box at a petrol station 100m (about 110 yards) inside Northern Ireland near Jonesborough.

Sir Ronnie Flanagan says he knew nothing of GCHQ’s involvement

Special Branch, who were monitoring the phone box, identified the voice as that of Liam Campbell, a senior Real IRA commander suspected of involvement in previous bombings.

At around 1330, the words “we’re crossing the line” were picked up from one of the mobiles, coinciding with one of the cars crossing the border into Northern Ireland at Aughnacloy.

By 1410 the cars were in Omagh, and at around 1420 came the same coded phrase used by the Banbridge bombers - “the bricks are in the wall”.

At 1504 the bomb exploded, by which time the bombers were safely back in the Irish Republic.

Transcripts

After the bombing, Panorama says, Special Branch asked GCHQ what happened and was told: “We missed it.”

Whether “missed it” was because GCHQ was simply recording the conversations, or whether officers had been listening in but had not understood the significance of the coded fragments, is not clear.

But, as Panorama reports, even if GCHQ could not have prevented the attack, more could have been done to help the investigation.

According to one of the sources who spoke to the programme, transcripts reporting exchanges with up to five mobiles associated with the bombers were sent to Belfast “within hours” of the bombing.

However, these were never disclosed to the detectives hunting the bombers.

In fact, Sir Ronnie Flanagan, former chief constable of both the Police Service of Northern Ireland and the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), told Panorama he was unaware GCHQ had been monitoring the bombers’ mobile phones.

‘Golden hours’

Former RUC and PSNI Assistant Chief Constable Ray White said that sharing telephone numbers and the identities of those using the mobiles with the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) immediately “would have been, in a sense, manna from heaven”.

He said that arrests could have been made in the “golden hours period” when forensic and other evidential opportunities were at their optimum.

However, Mr White said Special Branch members have told him they did not receive details of GCHQ intercepts until three days after the bombing.

Yet Panorama reports that while the Special Branch did brief the CID, their log shows this did not happen until three-and-a-half weeks after the bombing.

Even then detectives only received some of the names of the main suspects, with no details to help them build a case.

The fact that they had used mobile phones, and that GCHQ had voice recordings and their telephone numbers, was withheld.

Consequently the CID was forced to spend nine months trawling through 6.4 million telephone records to finally identify 22 suspects’ phones active in Omagh and four other bombings.

Although this proved which mobiles had been in Omagh, prosecutors needed evidence of who had been using them before going to court.

GCHQ had some voice recordings, but by law intercepts cannot be admitted as evidence. Panorama says there was nothing to stop the details from being shared with the CID to give them early leads.

In response to Panorama’s findings, Michael Gallagher, chairman of the Omagh Support and Self Help Group, said: “We have been demanding a public inquiry since 2002 into the abysmal failure of the police inquiries.

“In all conscience the government can no longer resist this.”

‘Panorama: Omagh - What the Police Never Knew’ will be broadcast on BBC One at 8.30pm on Monday 15 September.