Omagh verdict expected today

[red hander]

'Nuala O'Loan was too soft with her report 6 years ago.
"The victims, their families, the people of Omagh and officers of the RUC were let down by defective leadership, poor judgement and a lack of urgency."
Has that lady received public apologies yet from those public officials/politicians who abused her report and questioned her integrity.'

The unionist rearguard action has started already.  Unable to criticise their police force that were proven to have colluded in murder, despite unionists for years saying collusion was a myth.  

They're now putting the onus on Sinn Fein leaders to tell the police what they know about the perpetrators of the Omagh atrocity while ignoring the judge's findings (it's amazing how the establishment ignore their judges when those judges - on very rare occasions - criticise that establishment).  Wee Jeffrey was on the radio this morning and refused to back call for heads to roll over Flanagan's incompetence and the fact two police officers committed perjury in a court of law ... HYPOCRITES

[carnaross]

An innocent man may be free, but as has been said earlier, is he innocent? If this new forensic evidence is to be believed the perpetrator was a fourteen-year-old boy from Nottingham. So, of course Hoey is innocent!

The RUC and the PSNI have let the families and friends of the victims of the Omagh bomb down badly and should be called to account, especially Flanagan, Marshall and Cooper. Marshall and Cooper should be charged with perjury.

It just goes to show the arrogance of the RUC when high ranking detectives were nonchantly tampering with evidence to further their own preceived objectives. They've probably done this on numerous occasions and got away with it thanks to diplock courts. I bet they near shat themselves when they were finally exposed by the same system.
They should now apologise to the families in Omagh before being sacked from their posts as they've now ruined any possiblility of the real purportraitors being brought to justice.

Apologies to the Omagh families are worth nothing when all the families want is justice. That justice now includes a trial for perjury against the forensic officers resulting in a jail term.

As to it not being true regarding a 14 year-old from Nottingham being the perp, that's what was stated on BBC NI last night.

[pintsofguinness]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=504068&in_page_id=1770

In Hoey's trial, the prosecution used the LCN technique to link him to some of the explosive devices in the case.

However, its accuracy was brought into question when a sample taken from a car bomb in Lisburn, Co Antrim, was wrongly linked to a 14-year-old schoolboy in Nottingham.

[Trevor Hill]

Colm Murphy walked free from the Special Criminal Court in Dublin today after he was cleared of a conspiracy charge in relation to the 1998 Omagh bomb which killed 29 people and injured more than 300.

Murphy said after being acquitted of the charge: "I am glad to see it's all over."

The three-judge non-jury court ruled that there was no evidence upon which the court could have convicted Murphy after it ruled that all the evidence of 15 garda interviews with Murphy following his arrest in February 1999 was inadmissible.

The court said that the fact that notes of an interview conducted by Detective Garda John Fahy and Detective Garda Liam Donnelly were falsified, combined with the fact that there was no explanation of why this had happened, combined with the fact that this was part of a series of interviews being conducted by three teams of two garda detectives, tainted all of the interviews.

Detective Garda Fahy and Detective Garda Donnelly were charged with forgery and perjury after the original Murphy trial heard that their interview notes had been altered.

Both gardaí were acquitted of the charges and Detective Garda Donnelly has since died.

Murphy's counsel Mr Michael O' Higgins SC had applied to the court after a 20-day trial for a direction to acquit his client because there was not enough evidence to convict him.

Murphy, a 57-year-old native of Co Armagh, with an address at Jordan's Corner, Ravensdale, Co Louth has pleaded not guilty to conspiring with another person to cause an explosion likely to endanger life or cause serious injury to property in the State or elsewhere between August 13 and 16, 1998.

The prosecution had claimed that Murphy lent two mobile phones to a man who was involved in transporting the car bomb from Castleblayney, Co Monaghan to Omagh, where it exploded on August 15, 1998 killing 29 people, including a woman pregnant with twins, and injuring more than 300.

The Real IRA later claimed responsibility for the bomb attack, the worst terrorist atrocity in the history of the Troubles in the North.

Murphy was originally convicted of the charge in 2002, but the Court of Criminal Appeal quashed the conviction and ordered a retrial in 2005.

He is the second man to be acquitted in relation to the Omagh atrocity. Sean Hoey, a South Armagh electrician, walked free from Belfast Crown Court in December 2007 after a judge cleared him of all charges related to the bombing and a host of other Real IRA attacks.


Did Murphy not make a statement admitting his guilt?

[Zapatista]

I don't know but it wouldn't matter if he did and later deined it. He could always claim the Gardai falseified the statement.