Trial Ordered in ’98 Omagh Bomb Attack

A suspected Irish Republican Army dissident must stand trial on charges of murdering 29 people with a car bomb in Northern Ireland’s deadliest terrorist strike, a judge ruled Friday.

State prosecutors assembled a sufficiently strong case against Sean Hoey, an electrician, in the Aug. 15, 1998, attack in the town of Omagh, Magistrate Desmond Perry said.

Hoey, 36, is the first person to be charged with murder in the bombing.

Attorneys for Hoey contended that police forensic evidence was too weak for the case to proceed.

But the judge said Hoey had “a case to answer” for 58 charges connected to 14 bombs planted by the Real IRA faction in 1998.

Perry cited “the cumulative effect of the huge quantity of evidence that the defendant was the man who manufactured these 14 devices, the most devastating of which decimated the center of Omagh and resulted in the tragic deaths of 29 innocent people.”

Survivors have criticized British and Irish authorities for failing to convict anybody in the attack, which wounded more than 300 people.

The toll was particularly high because police, responding to vague telephone warnings, unwittingly evacuated people toward the bomb.