1998 Omagh bombing
The Omagh bombing occurred on August 15, 1998 in Omagh , the capital of Tyrone County in Northern Ireland . With the explosion of a car bomb the Real IRA 29 civilians were killed and injured than 300 today. The attack occurred around four months after the Good Friday Agreement was signed to end the Northern Ireland conflict and accelerated the peace process.
prehistory
In 1997, the Provisional IRA announced a ceasefire and all-party talks were held on peace in Northern Ireland. These talks and negotiations led to the signing of the Good Friday Agreement 1998, which formally ended the 30-year conflict in Northern Ireland.
Radical splinter groups tried to undermine the peace process through continued acts of violence. IRA Quartermaster General Michael McKevitt left the Provisionals and in November 1997 formed the Real IRA from like-minded people, which continued to strive for unification with Ireland. The organization is said to have between 30 and 175 people, including several explosives experts. His wife Bernadette Sands McKevitt ran the Real IRA's political arm and was in touch with Irish communities in the United States.
The Real IRA carried out seven car bomb attacks between January and August 1998, and British security authorities received telephone warnings from the IRA in advance of all attacks. These warnings suggested that loss of life was not seen as a primary goal.
In April 1998 an informant warned of possible car bomb attacks in Derry and Omagh. The Omagh Police Department received an anonymous phone call on August 4, 1998, announcing an attack on August 15, 1998 in Omagh.
At that time the city was the location of a courthouse and a police force, as well as the stationing place of the 1st Battalion of the Queen's Lancashire Regiment in the Lisanelly Barracks in the north. The residents were about 60% Catholics and 30% Protestants.
Omagh attack
On August 13, 1998, a car was stolen in the Irish border town of Carrickmacross . At around 2 p.m. on Saturday, August 15, 1998, the stolen vehicle was parked in front of a clothing store on Market Street in Omagh, with Northern Irish license plates attached. After arming the bomb, the weight of which was estimated to be around 227 kg, the two vehicle occupants left in an escape car that had been provided.
About half an hour later a bomb warning was received by telephone on a television station in Belfast . One man warned of a " Bomb, Courthouse, Omagh, Main Street, 500 lb (227 kg), explosion in 30 minutes. “About two minutes later, a telephone warning to an aid organization in Coleraine followed . This time the caller gave the location of the bomb 200 yards (183 meters) from the courthouse. After about three minutes, another call came to the Belfast TV station and the caller said there were 15 minutes left. In each of the first two calls, a code word was used that the Real IRA used as a distinguishing feature for possible false reports. All three calls were later traced to phone booths in southern Armagh County .
Since there was no main street in Omagh, the alerted police forces interpreted the High Street, the main shopping street in the center of the village, as the street mentioned, which continues as Market Street from the junction at Scarffe's Entry in an easterly direction. The courthouse, mentioned twice in the calls, was suspected to be the target of the attack; it is located in the western part of the city center on High Street, which meets George's Street here.
Since the explosion had been announced 200 yards from the court, passers-by and shopkeepers on High Street were directed eastward onto Market Street, which begins about 240 yards from the courthouse. There the car bomb exploded at around 3:10 p.m., some 500 yards (457 meters) from the courthouse. Two adjacent buildings were almost completely destroyed by the force of the detonation and a water pipe under the street broke open and other buildings in the area suffered severe property damage.
29 people were killed on the spot or later died in hospital, including two infants, nine children and adolescents under the age of 18, and twelve women and six men. Relatives had to identify their dead family members in the night and morning hours. Among the dead were 66-year-old Mary Grimes, her 30-year-old daughter Avril Monaghan and her 18-month-old granddaughter Maura Monaghan, who died three generations of a family. Avril Monaghan was also pregnant with twins, which is why some sources put the number of victims of the attack at 31. Maura Monaghan was also the youngest victim of the explosion, followed by a 20-month-old toddler. Other victims included the niece of a DUP member of the Northern Ireland Assembly and two exchange students from Spain. The last victim died in hospital on September 5th.
Between 200 and 300 people suffered injuries of varying severity, some were in a coma for weeks, lost limbs or had to undergo skin grafts. Tyrone County Hospital could not cope with the large number of injuries, so patients were distributed to hospitals across Northern Ireland. While the injured was being transported away, a father of three died in a traffic accident when his vehicle collided with an ambulance at an intersection.
consequences
It was the single attack with the greatest number of victims in the Northern Ireland conflict and affected Protestants and Catholics alike. The event aroused great outrage and rejection in the public and among all conflict parties. For the first time in the history of the Civil War, a republican attack was publicly condemned by the Sinn Féin party . The Real IRA did not confess to the crime until three days later and regretted the loss of life, but blamed the security authorities for the many victims.
The Omagh car bomb subsequently accelerated the peace process in Northern Ireland. On August 18, the Real IRA announced the cessation of all operations, while the Republican Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) announced a ceasefire on August 22. Prime Minister Tony Blair visited the site on August 26 and promised crackdown on paramilitary organizations that oppose the peace process. On September 3, US President Bill Clinton gave a speech to survivors and relatives of the victims in Omagh on the occasion of a visit to the island of Ireland. At the same time the Irish Parliament passed a law to facilitate the prosecution of terrorists. On September 7th, the Real IRA also announced a ceasefire.
The first meeting between a Republican and a Unionist party leader of the Northern Ireland conflict took place in Belfast on September 10, when Gerry Adams of Sinn Féin and David Trimble of the Ulster Unionists met for a discussion. The first release of paramilitary prisoners under the Good Friday Agreement took place on September 11th.
Suspicious and judicial processing
Colm Murphy and Michael McKevitt
A number of arrests were made in Northern Ireland and Ireland following the attack. In February 1999, Irish native Colm Murphy became the first suspect to be charged with the Omagh bombing. He is said to have provided the cell phones that were said to have been used by the attackers to coordinate the attack. He was burdened by cell phone recordings and his own statements. He was found guilty of conspiracy in the Omagh attack by the Dublin Special Court in January 2002 and sentenced to 14 years' imprisonment. The court also highlighted Murphy's longstanding IRA practice and criminal record. In January 2005, however, his conviction was overturned by the Irish Court of Appeals on the grounds of insufficient evidence. In February 2010 he was acquitted.
In March 2001, Real IRA founder Michael McKevitt was arrested in Ireland . In August 2003, he became the first person in Ireland to be sentenced to 20 years in prison under the new criminal offense of conducting terrorism and joining an illegal organization. He himself always denied involvement in the Omagh attack. During the course of his imprisonment, he developed cancer and had to undergo an operation in 2015. He was released from custody at Easter 2016.
Sean Hoey and the LCN-DNA process
Sean Hoey, a nephew of Colm Murphy, from County Armagh, Northern Ireland, was arrested on questionable forensic evidence in September 2003 and was the first suspect to be charged with the Omagh murders and other crimes in May 2005. The murder trial became one of the largest in British legal history, culminating in Hoey's acquittal in Belfast Crown Court in December 2007.
Judge Reginald Weir strongly criticized the police in dealing with evidence and accused two officers of false testimony, which is why their statements were no longer taken into account. The public prosecutor's office had relied primarily on the LCN-DNA method, which had previously been widely used in Great Britain, which only required a few cells the size of a millionth of a grain of salt and was very susceptible to contamination. Such a trace was allegedly secured at the crime scene and compared with Hoey's DNA. Weir criticized the way in which the public prosecutor's office had made LCN-DNA the central point of their argumentation and thus suppressed missing witness statements and non-existent incriminating evidence. He accused the investigators of calculated misleading and an attempted revaluation of the evidence in order to bring about a conviction.
Finally, the court found that the method had not been tested enough and recommended a review. The day after the verdict, the UK prosecutor suspended the LCN DNA analysis and commissioned a review of the suitability of the method. In January 2008, the prosecution decided to continue to allow the method as potential evidence. The final Camon report of April 2008 emphasized with regard to the method in general that the nature of the original source material could not be determined, that the time at which a transfer took place could not be deduced and that the possibility of secondary transfer compared to the standard -DNA, is significantly increased.
Civil litigation
In August 2001, relatives of several of the fatalities brought civil actions against Michael McKevitt, Liam Campbell, Colm Murphy, Seamus McKenna and Seamus Daly. In April 2008 the trial began in the Belfast High Court. In May 2008, as a novelty, the civil action was transferred to an Irish court so that Irish police officers could testify.
For the first time, a terrorist organization, the Real IRA, was found liable in a civil litigation. As a result, members who had belonged to this organization at the time of the attack could be sentenced to pay damages. McKevitt, Murphy, Daly and Campbell were members of the IRA, according to Judge Declan Morgan, and the burden of proof would be overwhelming. Liam Campbell is believed to have served on the IRA Military Council and was first arrested in October 2000. In October 2001, he was sentenced to several years in prison for membership in an illegal organization. Also from Ireland, Seamus Daly was arrested in November 2000 and charged with IRA membership in February 2003. He pleaded guilty in February 2004 and received a prison term. Seamus McKenna was the only one of the accused to be acquitted on the basis of unreliable testimony. He died in an industrial accident in County Louth, Ireland in July 2013 .
In June 2009 the four defendants were sentenced to pay £ 1.6 million in damages . Your challenge to the judgment failed in 2011 at the court of appeal. A subsequent motion to bring the case to the Supreme Court was denied. McKevitt and Murphy received a renegotiation, but this ended in 2015 with the same judgment as in 2009. Most recently, McKevitt and Murphy failed at the European Court of Justice in September 2016 .
Seamus Daly
In April 2014, Seamus Daly was charged with 29 murders and other crimes. According to the prosecutor, he is said to have owned one of the two cell phones that were used to coordinate the attack. According to the court, he was considered a foot soldier of the IRA and could not adequately exonerate himself against the court's evidence. In March 2016, all charges against him were dropped due to the unreliability of a key witness.
Movie and TV
- Omagh - The assassination attempt by Pete Travis
- Who bombed Omagh? , BBC Panorama Documentary
- Omagh, What the Police Were Never Told , BBC Panorama documentary
literature
- Aftermath: The Omagh Bombing and the Families' Pursuit of Justice by Ruth Dudley Edwards
- Absolutely bad? The logic of killing and the moral legitimacy of terrorism. by Marcel Baumann
- Anatomy of Crime: Milestones in Forensics by Val McDermid