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Relatives of the Omagh bomb victims today finally won their landmark civil action against Real IRA terrorists.
A High Court judge named Real IRA founder Michael McKevitt as the man "responsible" for the 1998 atrocity which claimed 29 lives, including a woman pregnant with twins.
Mr Justice Morgan awarded more than £1.6million in damages to 12 named relatives who took the action.
Three other suspects - Liam Campbell, Colm Murphy and Seamus Daly - were also found liable at the High Court in Belfast. A fifth, Seamus McKenna, was cleared of involvement.
Today's ruling was an extraordinary victory for the relatives and supporters who had fought for more than 10 years for justice.
They launched their action after the failure of the police to secure a criminal conviction.
They sued five men and the Real IRA as an organisation for up to £14million in a case which made legal history when it sat to hear evidence in both Belfast and Dublin.
Mr Justice Morgan said it was clear that McKevitt was a senior figure in the dissident republican group at the time of the bombing and was heavily involved in the procurement of explosives.
Much of the evidence came from an undercover FBI agent, who infiltrated the Real IRA in the years after the attack.
After the hearing one of the relatives, Victor Barker, whose 12-year-old son James was killed in the attack, said he was delighted with the outcome.
"I never built my hopes up too much after what happened before," he said, "but I'm absolutely over the moon."
In August 1998, only four months after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, a 500lb bomb in a stolen Vauxhall Cavalier ripped through the County Tyrone market town.
Twenty-one people were killed instantly and some of their bodies were never found. The civil case opened in April last year and finished hearing evidence in March.
Mr Justice Morgan took three months to sift through the evidence and produce his judgment.
None of the bombers he named attended the hearings. McKevitt is currently in prison in the Republic of Ireland.
Campbell, a farmer, is in custody in Northern Ireland facing a bid to extradite him to Lithuania to face arms smuggling charges.
Murphy was found guilty in Dublin's Special Criminal Court of conspiring to cause the Omagh bomb but his conviction was later quashed.
Reader views (1)
They should surely have got more damages. I would like to see these scum, if not in jail where they rightfully belong, at least bankrupted for the rest of their miserable lives. They should see their lives out on a diet of bread and water. Animals.
- Nik Cholerton, Fulham
