IRA veteran released for lack of evidence
Print Edition
THE Real IRA veteran accused of murdering 29 people in Omagh had all charges dropped yesterday after prosecutors concluded that the evidence against him — particularly a witness supposed to place him in the Northern Ireland town that day — was too weak.
Seamus Daly has spent nearly two years in prison awaiting trial for the August 15, 1998, car bomb attack on a crowd of shoppers, workers and tourists. His case joins a string of failed prosecutions against the alleged Real IRA figures long blamed for the deadliest single bombing of the entire Northern Ireland conflict.
Daly, 45, did serve a brief prison sentence in the Republic of Ireland after pleading guilty in 2004 to membership in the Real IRA, one of several outlawed factions all styling themselves as the “true” Irish Republican Army.
These small, feud-prone gangs reject the cease-fire observed since 1997 by the major group, the Provisional IRA.
The Real IRA planted a string of car bombs in Northern Ireland towns in 1998 in a bid to undermine support for that year’s Good Friday peace accord, which sought to end a three-decade conflict that claimed 3,700 lives. Police prevented deaths in several other car bombings with swift evacuations.
But on that unusually sunny Saturday in Omagh, police responding to vague telephone warnings ordered people away from the town’s hilltop courthouse down Market Street — and straight to the bomb parked outside a shop selling back-to-school uniforms. Most of those slain were women and children, including a mother 9 months’ pregnant with twins.
At the time, public horror over the Omagh atrocity spurred an island-wide security crackdown on those IRA factions that refused to back the peace.
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