Worst Bombing in N. Ireland Conflict Kills at Least 28

A powerful car bomb exploded amid a crowd of shoppers in the Northern Irish market town of Omagh on Saturday, killing at least 28 people and wounding about 200, including many children, in the single worst attack in three decades of sectarian violence.

Police had received an anonymous warning of a bomb in the mixed Protestant and Roman Catholic town, but, apparently misdirected by the caller, they unwittingly ushered pedestrians toward the blast instead of away from it, adding to the slaughter.

No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack about 55 miles west of Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland, but it was widely believed to be the work of Irish Republican Army dissidents opposed to the Northern Ireland peace agreement.

The bombing cast doubt on the future of paramilitary cease-fires and of the Good Friday peace accord, which is an attempt to end the conflict through negotiations and a power-sharing provincial government.

The bloodshed in Omagh stunned a region that had voted overwhelmingly for peace in a referendum in May and hoped it had put such carnage behind it.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair, whose Northern Ireland policy is based on the April peace accord, vowed to pursue those responsible for the attack, which came on the 29th anniversary of the deployment of British troops in Northern Ireland.

“These people will never be allowed to win,” Blair said.

President Clinton condemned the attack as “butchery” and said it will not alter his plans to visit Northern Ireland in early September to underscore his support for a peaceful settlement between Protestant unionists who want the region to remain a part of Britain and Catholic nationalists who want to be united with the Irish Republic.

Witnesses described the bombing as an act of savagery that turned a sunny summer afternoon into a scene of mayhem, with bodies thrown across a downtown intersection under a spray of water from burst hydrants and wreckage from blown-out storefronts.

Many families from Omagh and surrounding rural areas were out shopping for school uniforms two weeks before classes resume and waiting for a carnival parade when the bomb exploded. An 18-month-old baby and a pregnant woman were among the dead, and doctors reported that many children were maimed in the blast.

“This wasn’t an attack on police, army or the peace process,” said Police Chief Ronnie Flanagan of the Royal Ulster Constabulary. “This was an attack on men, women and children on the busiest day in Omagh.”

Frequently, violent nationalists warn the police when they are about to set off a bomb, in an apparent effort to minimize human casualties while inflicting material damage.

But Flanagan said that this time he believes the bombers “deliberately” gave police false information when they telephoned at 2:30 p.m. to say a bomb had been placed outside the Omagh courthouse. Officers quickly herded pedestrians away from the courthouse to what they thought was a safe area at an intersection a few blocks away. The crowd was standing behind white police tape, waiting for the crisis to pass, when the bomb exploded in front of it half an hour after the warning call.

“I cannot find words bad enough to describe the people who did this,” said John Wilson, 60, who was thrown to the ground by the blast.

A hardware store manager dug himself out from beneath the shop’s collapsed roof about 20 yards from the blast site to help survivors in the bloodied streets.

“We just saw limbs and bodies everywhere and black smoke,” said the shopkeeper, choking back tears. “We used our delivery van to take people to the hospital. I saw one fellow, his whole leg was gone. . . . He was just a child.”

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Omagh is a provincial market town where Catholics and Protestants have lived together relatively peacefully. Although there have been other bombings there during the 30 years of conflict in Northern Ireland, known as the Troubles, the town has never been a hotbed of sectarianism. Protestants and Catholics alike were among the victims.

Kevin Skelton’s wife was one of them. She and her three daughters were shopping for school shoes while he waited next door when the explosion blew down the shop walls.

“My wife was lying on the floor with her clothes blown off,” Skelton, 43, said in tears. “I tried to get her pulse. I couldn’t find her pulse. The police tried, and they dragged me out.” His three teenage daughters survived, one badly injured, but Skelton was unable to find his wife late Saturday.

“I am as good an Irishman as the next, but I wouldn’t go blowing people up in Omagh,” said the distraught Skelton, who belongs to the nationalist Gaelic Athletic Assn.

The bombing is believed to have been carried out by an IRA splinter group, most likely the one known as the Real IRA. There are two other dissident groups, the Continuity IRA and the Irish National Liberation Army.

These groups oppose the mainstream IRA’s July 1997 cease-fire and believe the IRA’s political wing, Sinn Fein, has sold out to the pro-British unionists. The Good Friday peace agreement recognizes Northern Ireland as a part of the United Kingdom for the first time and says that will continue as long as a majority of the province’s citizens agree to it.

All three dissident groups have been trying to sabotage the accord since it was signed on Good Friday. Officials increasingly have expressed concern that the groups might be working together, pooling their bomb-making skills.

The Real IRA claimed responsibility for a car bomb in the town of Banbridge on Aug. 1 that injured 35 people. It is believed to operate from south of the border in the Irish Republic. Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern has vowed to crack down on it.

After Saturday’s bombing, Sinn Fein officials for the first time issued unqualified statements against such an attack.

“I condemn the action without equivocation,” Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams said. Martin McGuinness, a Sinn Fein member of the new Northern Ireland legislature, called the bombing “an indefensible act designed to wreck the [peace] process.”

Nonetheless, hard-line Protestants viewed the bombing as proof that Sinn Fein is a sham and that the IRA is unable or unwilling to bring an end to such violence.

“This is another act of fierce republican murder,” said the Rev. Ian Paisley of the Democratic Unionist Party, who opposes the peace agreement. “There is no difference between this and others we’ve had with the IRA and Sinn Fein.”

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The stakes for Adams and Sinn Fein are tremendous. Increasing numbers of Protestant leaders have been calling for them to be kept out of the new provincial government until the IRA declares an end to its war and hands over its weapons, even though that requirement is not clearly stated in the peace agreement.

Protesters also are balking at the release from jail of IRA prisoners--an action agreed to in the peace negotiations.

This opposition is likely to increase in the wake of the bombing.

Even David Trimble, the moderate Protestant first minister of Northern Ireland, attacked Sinn Fein, saying that the IRA political wing could not avoid responsibility. He said the bombing might not have occurred if the IRA had been forced to disarm.

Trimble’s mainstream Protestant party has been badly split over the peace agreement, which was backed by the British and Irish prime ministers and Clinton, and he is struggling to hold on to support for the accord from a majority of Protestants.

He also clearly fears that Protestant paramilitaries will decide to break their cease-fires in light of the violence coming from Catholic republicans, whether or not they belong to the IRA. In the past, the armed Protestant groups have responded in kind.

John Hume, leader of the Social Democratic and Labor Party, who is considered one of the architects of the peace agreement and the leading Catholic politician in Northern Ireland, looked devastated after the bombing.

“A tiny minority is seeking to impose their views by murder and bombs, and that is undiluted fascism,” Hume said. “These are enemies of the people of Ireland north and south, and the people of Ireland north and south should treat them as such.”

In May, 71% of the people of Northern Ireland voted for the peace referendum, and more than 90% of the people of the Irish Republic supported it.

Amid the wreckage of Saturday’s bombing, political leaders and average citizens alike insisted that the peace process will go forward.

“I can barely express the sense of grief I feel for the victims of this appalling, evil act of savagery,” Blair said. “Our other emotion has got to be not simply one of outrage at the evil of it, and total determination to bring the perpetrators to justice, but an equal determination that these people will not win, that they will not destroy the process that we have built up.”

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Times special correspondent Martina Purdy contributed to this report from Omagh.