Man Cleared in 1998 Northern Ireland Blast

December 21, 2007 8:06 am henrymunsonjr Northern Ireland

John F. Burns, Man Cleared in 1998 Northern Ireland Blast - New York Times, December 21, 2007

LONDON — A judge in Belfast on Thursday cleared Sean Hoey, a 38-year-old electrician, of murder and all other charges stemming from the car bombing in 1998 that killed 29 people and wounded more than 200 in the Northern Ireland town of Omagh.

The long-awaited verdict left investigators in Northern Ireland without a single conviction in the Omagh bombing, which was regarded as the worst atrocity in 30 years of sectarian strife in the British province. Prosecutors had asserted that Mr. Hoey was the principal bombmaker in the attack, which featured a 500-pound car bomb that exploded on Omagh’s main street at the height of Saturday shopping.

The bombing came less than four months after the Good Friday peace agreement in 1998 that led, earlier this year, to the restoration of democratic rule in Northern Ireland, under a governing coalition of Protestants and Catholics. At the time, the police and politicians said the attack had been carried out by a group calling itself the Real I.R.A., a splinter group of the overwhelmingly Catholic Irish Republican Army, which opposed the peace agreement.

Mr. Hoey was found not guilty on all 56 charges he faced in connection with the Omagh bombing and a series of other bombings and killings involving police and military targets in northern Ireland that preceded the Omagh attack. The verdict brought cheers from supporters of Mr. Hoey, who was released after four years of pre-trial custody, but relatives of the Omagh victims, many of them women and children, appeared stunned.

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