Charges In '98 N. Ireland Blast
A suspected Irish Republican Army dissident will be charged with murdering 29 people in Northern Ireland's deadliest terrorist attack, a 1998 car bombing in Omagh, a prosecutor said Tuesday.
Sean Gerard Hoey, 35, has been behind bars since September 2003 while awaiting trial for about 20 other charges related to dissident IRA bombings in 1998, a momentous year in Northern Ireland with its landmark Good Friday peace accord.
State prosecutor Gordon Kerr, while opposing a bail application by Hoey, told Belfast High Court that prosecutors have accepted a police recommendation to charge Hoey with the murders of all 29 people killed by the Aug. 15, 1998, bomb. He would be first to be charged with the murders.
Court officials said Hoey's lawyers would probably receive notification of the charges by May 19, and Hoey would appear in a Belfast court May 26 for both sides' lawyers to argue whether police have sufficient grounds for the murder charges to be pursued.
The dissidents, who opposed the IRA's 1997 cease-fire, planted several car bombs in Northern Ireland towns and cities in 1998 in hopes of derailing the complex Good Friday deal. Police and British army explosives experts that year prevented deaths in other towns with quick evacuations and bomb defusings.
But the bomb planted in Omagh became an unprecedented tragedy when police, responding to vague telephoned warnings, accidentally evacuated shop workers, shoppers and tourists straight toward the bomb. It detonated in a crowd, killing mostly children and women, among them a woman eight months' pregnant with twins, and wounded more than 300.
The carnage forced leaders of the IRA dissidents, nicknamed the "Real IRA" by Irish media, to suspend their violence for two years. The Real IRA since 2000 has resumed sporadic attacks in Northern Ireland, but most of their efforts have failed either through police intervention or faulty construction of their bombs.
Until now, detectives leading the hunt for those responsible for bombing Omagh have faced harsh criticism from relatives of the 29 dead — particularly over the failure to charge anyone with murder.
Relatives welcomed news of the latest charges against Hoey, an electrician who lives in the Northern Ireland border village of Jonesborough, an area notorious for IRA activity. He was arrested in September 2003 in a dawn operation involving more than 200 police and soldiers who surrounded his home using helicopters.
Among the original charges filed against Hoey was an accusation he supplied a key part of the bomb used in Omagh. He was charged with involvement in two other car bombings earlier in 1998.
Several relatives of the Omagh dead are pressing ahead with an unprecedented civil lawsuit against five alleged Real IRA chiefs, but not Hoey. Their effort, launched in 2001, seeks $19 million in damages from the five, but it has been delayed for years because of spiraling legal costs and procedural arguments.
In another development pertaining to the IRA, European Union lawmakers on Tuesday asked for the unprecedented use of EU funds to help three sisters from Northern Ireland sue IRA members suspected of killing their brother if authorities do not prosecute them.
The European Parliament adopted a motion condemning "violence and criminality of the self-styled Irish Republican Army." The motion, backed by a large majority of the 732-member legislature, says Catherine, Gemma and Paula McCartney should receive aid to help meet legal costs. Their brother, Robert, had his throat and stomach slashed outside a Belfast pub on Jan. 30.