'Real IRA': We Bombed Omagh
The "Real IRA," a splinter group opposed to Northern Ireland's peace accord, Tuesday claimed responsibility for the Omagh bombing that killed 28 people and injured 220, and apologized for the huge civilian casualty.
Press Association, the British news agency, said the group asserted that it gave three warnings, and had not meant to kill civilians.
"We offer apologies to these civilians," the group said in a statement to a newspaper in Dublin.
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The announcement came as villagers laid to rest a mother and her young daughter in a church graveyard on a hill - the first in a long line of funerals for the victims.
As the funeral ended, Prince Charles arrived in Northern Ireland to bring royal condolences to Omagh, the shattered town where a 500-pound car bomb exploded Saturday, killing mostly women and children in the worst atrocity in three decades of sectarian conflict.
"I'm shattered and horrified, and the least I can do is to come here and offer my sympathy and support," said Charles.
"I do have some understanding of the awful horror that people have to put up with when their relatives are killed," he added, recalling the IRA assassination in 1979 of his great-uncle, Lord Mountbatten.
Charles was to visit some of the people injured in the blast, and tour the shattered Market Street of Omagh.
The coffins of 30-year-old Avril Monaghan, pregnant with twins, and her 18-month-old daughter, Maura, made the short trip from the family home down a tree-lined lane flanked by mourners in total silence. The mother's brown wooden casket dwarfed the small white one in the flower-laden black hearse.
During the Requiem Mass in St. Macartan's Catholic Church in Augher, the congregation, which included Mrs. Monaghan's husband, Michael, and their three other young children, sang, "My soul is longing for your peace." Men and women, their heads bowed, stood among gravestones outside listening to the service.
Mrs. Monaghan's mother, Mary Grimes, 65, was also killed.
At dawn Monday, police arrested five people in the attack. The "Real IRA" is composed of defectors from the Irish Repubican Army opposed to April's peace agreement providing for power-sharing between Protestants and Catholics in this British province.
The Rev. James Grimes, one of the priests who celebrated the Mass and who is Mrs. Monaghan's uncle, prayed that the Omagh tragedy "would be the last of the terrible agonies our people have suffered over the past 30 years."
"Her faith was strong," he said. "That faith always showed in the smile and the happiness and the care and the love of Avril."
In Belfast, several thousand people turned out for a lunchtime open-air service.
"This is a time for prayers, not speeches," said Lord Mayor David Alderdice before the crowd stood in silent tribute. "A time to be quiet and to listen to the still, small voice."
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| Sean McLoughlin (CBS) |
The British and Irish prime ministers have pledged their utmost to convict the bombers, and some politicians are calling for internment without trial for suspects.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who met with some of the injured, wrote in two Northern Ireland newspapers Tuesday that the province's police chief, Ronnie Flanagan, had told him the IRA was not responsible for the bomb, and there was no evidence that IRA explosives were used.
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| Jimmy Barker (CBS) |
The suspects arrested included Shane Mackey, 19, son of an Omagh councilman, Francis Mackey, a leading critic of the support by the IRA and its political ally, Sinn Fein, of the April accord because it does not provide for a united Ireland.
Talk of politics was markedly absent in many of the towns across Northern Ireland that numbered residents among the victims. More than 100 people remained hospitalized, including 11 in critical condition. Nine children died, and a number of people were blinded or crippled.
"People are suffering in shock," said Gordon McLaren, shopkeeper in Augher. "Has anyone talked of politics? No, they have not."
Written by Kristin Gazlay