FOXNews.com - Northern Ireland Marks 1998 Car Bombing

Northern Ireland Marks 1998 Car Bombing

Sunday, August 13, 2006

OMAGH, Northern Ireland — Survivors of the 1998 car bombing of Omagh, the deadliest terror strike in the history of Northern Ireland, laid floral wreaths and observed a minute's silence Sunday at the spot where 29 people were slain by Irish Republican Army dissidents.

Each year since the 500-pound bomb tore through a crowd of shoppers, workers and tourists _ mostly women and children _ relatives of the dead have gathered at a memorial garden in this religiously mixed, largely middle-class town of 25,000 people.

Nobody has been convicted of the crime, although the accused bomb maker, 33-year-old Sean Hoey, has been in jail awaiting trial for more than a year.

Relatives of the dead, who are also pursuing a civil lawsuit against five senior IRA dissidents, have expressed doubt that justice will ever be done.

Taking part in Sunday's ceremony were Protestant ministers and a Catholic priest, as well as representatives of both the British and Irish governments.

The Real IRA, a dissident group opposed to the IRA cease-fire of 1997 and Northern Ireland's Good Friday peace accord of 1998, claimed responsibility for bombing Omagh. The death toll was particularly high because police, responding to vague telephoned warnings, unwittingly evacuated workers and residents toward the bomb, which detonated in the middle of a crowd.

The toll eclipsed a 1974 IRA bombing of two pubs in Birmingham, England, which claimed 21 lives.