Ex-RUC officers welcome fresh Omagh atrocity probe

On Friday, a judge recommended the UK government carries out a fresh investigation into the bombing, and urged the Irish government to do likewise, after finding “plausible arguments” that there was a “real prospect” of preventing the mas murder.

The Real IRA car bomb in Omagh on August 15, 1998 claimed the lives of 29 people, including a woman pregnant with twins.

Friday’s ruling was delivered at Belfast High Court in a case brought by Michael Gallagher, whose son Aiden was one of the victims.

A spokesman for the Northern Ireland Retired Police Officers’ Association (NIRPOA), representing several officers involved in the original murder investigation and intelligence gathering, said any new, impartial investigation should give the families, and the general public, a better understanding of how intelligence is gathered, assessed and disseminated.

“We would welcome a fresh in-depth analysis on both sides of the border as it might bring the clarity the bereaved families are entitled to,” he said.

One of the main criticisms of the police intelligence handling, immediately prior to the Omagh bomb, is that Special Branch officers did not interpret an anonymous, telephone caller’s claim of a gun and rocket attack on police as an indication of the Omagh bomb attack.

The former officer said: “Across the board, there is a gross misunderstanding of the work that needs to be done with information before it has a place within the investigative process.

“The call about the attack on police was, and could only be assessed as, a nuisance/malicious call. The total absence of a subsequent attack as described bears that out. There is a very big difference between what was stated in the call and what actually transpired. It is simply not credible that the call came from a member of the bombing team or their close associates.

“No armed attack took place on police in the area, no arms were discovered subsequent to the receipt of the information. Nothing panned out.”

The former officer said that snippets of information can be singled out for scrutiny with the benefit of hindsight, but only when all of the available information – some of which might contradict other sources – is assessed can its true worth be evaluated.

He added: “All intelligence starts its life as information; only when it has been gathered, recorded, collated, analysed and assessed does it become ‘intelligence’. Even then it may receive an extremely low grading as to reliability.

“In over 25 years in Special Branch and the CID I personally cannot recall a single incident where top-quality intelligence was received anonymously via telephone or any other medium.”

The former officer went on to say: “If the Special Branch assessed every such call as credible intelligence and promulgated it to the remainder of the police and the army they would have been guilty of crying wolf and in the end their intelligence, even when very good, would have been disregarded.

“Uniform and CID officers [and the Army] would have been running around in circles if every call on, for example, the Confidential Telephone had been passed on as ‘credible intelligence’.

“One sure fire way of losing your human sources, and ensuring that there are no further volunteers to replace them, is to hand over any raw intelligence you might acquire to someone outside of Special Branch. It must be sanitised to protect the identity of your informant.

“There is usually a balance to be struck between passing over the maximum value to the recipient and protecting the source to enable him or her to stay alive and keep providing life saving information. Whatever you have handed over you have lost all control of.”

• Two Special Branch officers received an apology from the ombudsman’s office over what they claimed was the “negative spin” put on every aspect of their actions around the Omagh investigation.

In her 2001 report on the 1998 atrocity, ombudsman Nuala O’Loan criticised how a detective inspector (DI) and detective sergeant had handled intelligence provided through an anonymous call.

It was asserted that the “victims, their families and officers of the RUC have been let down by defective leadership, poor judgment and a lack of urgency,”

Speaking to the News Letter in August 2018, the former DI said he had been shunned by people who believed he was at least partly responsible for the deaths, but said the apology in 2009 “helped greatly”.

In the letter of apology, then PONI chief executive Sam Pollock said: “I feel we failed you in a number of areas which I have identified throughout the report. I have apologised to you in person and I do so again in writing and I do so unequivocally.”

Mr Pollock said that while he was “not detracting from the determinations of the ombudsman,” he was of the opinion his apology “in itself cannot undo the dissatisfaction you have felt for so long”.

He added: “I hope that it is the first step in you feeling that your integrity and esteem can be restored.”

The Office of the Police Ombudsman has been invited to respond to the latest NIRPOA comments.

READ: High Court recommends fresh probe into Omagh bombing

READ: Omagh bomb officers: we were wronged by O’Loan probe

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