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Man is to face charges over Omagh bomb
BY DERIC HENDERSON

A MAN is to be charged with murdering the 29 people who died in the Omagh bomb atrocity.
The office of the Director of Public Prosecutions in Belfast has given police the go-ahead after a mammoth new investigation which involved a review of all the forensic evidence by an international panel of scientists.
Papers outlining details of the charges are due to be served later this month on Sean Gerard Hoey, 35, an electrician from Jonesborough, south Armagh.
It will be one the biggest mass murder trials in British and Irish legal history.
Hoey is already in custody on a series of terrorist charges and membership of the Real IRA, the dissident republican group which bombed Omagh in August 1998.
Apart from the 29 killed in the no-warning blast, including a woman pregnant with twins, more than 300 were injured in the worst single terrorist outrage in Ulster.
Hoey is also accused of explosives charges as well as possessing timer units allegedly linked to several mortar, car and roadside bombs in the months before Omagh - at Forkhill and Crossmaglen, south Armagh, Lisburn, Co Antrim, Armagh, Belleek, Co Fermanagh, Newry, Co Down, Blackwatertown, Co Armagh and two in Belfast, a railway halt at Finaghy on the outskirts and a police station near the city centre.
With documents running into thousands, the police files in the case have been with the Director of Public Prosecutions since last summer after a complex 18-month review of all the forensic evidence by scientists from Toronto, New York and Switzerland.
A spokesman for the PSNI said: "The Omagh inquiry is very much a live investigation to which police continue to dedicate significant time and resources.
"The current position is that the senior investigating officer has received directions from the DPP which are being processed."
The new police inquiry began in May 2002 and followed damning criticism by Police Ombudsman Nuala O'Loan of the original investigation by the RUC and the then Chief Constable Sir Ronnie Flanagan.
Hoey's uncle, Colm Murphy, 49, a builder from Dundalk, Co Louth, was the only person convicted in connection with Omagh when he was jailed in Dublin for 14 years in January 2002.
He has been granted a re-trial in the Republic's Court of Criminal Appeal, ordered after doubt was cast on the evidence of two Garda officers.
Murphy and four other men are being sued for £14 million by some of the Omagh relatives, although no date has been fixed for the start of that High Court hearing.
Hoey, who is being held at Maghaberry Prison, near Lisburn, Co Antrim, is due to appear at a remand hearing at Craigavon, Co Armagh on May 19.