Suspected IRA Dissident Faces 15 Charges
1 hour, 20 minutes ago
By SHAWN POGATCHNIK, Associated Press Writer
BELFAST, Northern Ireland - A suspected Irish Republican Army dissident faced 15 charges Saturday, including possession of key parts of the car bomb used to kill 29 people in Northern Ireland's deadliest explosion.
The apparent breakthrough in a five-year hunt for those responsible for bombing Omagh came as David Trimble, the Protestant politician central to the survival of Northern Ireland's peace process, narrowly defeated a hard-line challenge within his divided Ulster Unionist Party.
Trimble, who has faced repeated Ulster Unionist revolts because of his support for the Good Friday peace accord of 1998, triumphed in a 443-359 vote of his party's grassroots council.
The victory allowed him to proceed with plans to suspend or expel three senior critics, who oppose plans for reviving a joint Catholic-Protestant government. Trimble, who had led the power-sharing government until its collapse last October, could have been ousted as party leader had he lost the vote.
In Craigavon Magistrates Court southwest of Belfast, Sean Hoey was arraigned on charges he possessed explosive devices used in 13 dissident IRA attacks, including the Aug. 15, 1998 strike on Omagh; had conspired to bomb the predominantly Protestant town of Lisburn 3 1/2 months earlier; and was a member of a breakaway faction of the outlawed IRA.
The handcuffed Hoey, 34, nodded to acknowledge he understood the charges against him. He was ordered held without bail until his next scheduled court appearance Oct. 2.
A police detective testified that Hoey had pleaded not guilty when initially informed of the charges against him Friday in a police station, where he had been interrogated for three days.
Hoey became the second person to be charged in connection with the blast at Omagh, when police responding to confusing telephoned warnings accidentally evacuated civilians towards the 500-pound (225 kg) car bomb. In the neighboring Republic of Ireland, IRA veteran Colm Murphy was convicted in January 2002 of supplying the mobile phones used by the bombers and received a 14-year prison term.
Saturday's Omagh-related charge accused Hoey of possessing the timer-power unit of the Omagh bomb "on a date unknown" between March 12, 1997, and Aug. 16, 1998. Forensics experts who spent weeks combing through the Omagh rubble recovered remains of the timer-power unit, the heart of the bomb that triggered its detonation.
The detective, who wasn't identified by name in court, testified that part of the prosecution case would seek to link those remains to forensic evidence gleaned from a car bomb successfully defused by British army experts in Lisburn on April 30, 1998.
In the Irish Republic, meanwhile, police arrested a 20-year-old man Saturday after finding a dissident IRA weapons dump containing explosives and ammunition in a house in the western town of Sligo. Irish army experts inspected the explosives cache as police searched neighboring homes.
Police believe Hoey, an electrician, is an experienced IRA bombmaker who followed Michael McKevitt ? the IRA's former "quartermaster" responsible for acquiring and storing weapons ? in forging a breakaway faction that opposes the IRA cease-fire of July 1997.
Northern Ireland police backed by British troops in helicopters swooped on Hoey's home Tuesday in the South Armagh borderland, the IRA's primary venue for bomb-making ever since the secretive organization began mounting attacks in the British territory in 1970.
Hoey had been arrested three times before on suspicion of involvement in the Omagh bombing and other dissident attacks, but was freed without charge.
McKevitt was convicted last month in the Irish Republic on a charge of directing terrorism and received a 20-year sentence. His reputed deputy, Liam Campbell, has also been imprisoned after being convicted of membership in an IRA dissident group. A third prominent figure, Seamus Daly, is awaiting trial on similar charges.
However, no IRA dissident has been charged with any of the 29 killings. Relatives of the Omagh dead are pressing ahead with a civil lawsuit ? unprecedented in Northern Ireland legal history ? against McKevitt, Campbell, Daly, Murphy and another reputed IRA dissident named Seamus McKenna. The relatives are seeking around 10 million pounds (US$15 million) in damages.
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LoL - I remember I had an art teacher who was Irish-American. He was very proud about supporting the IRA and always talked about the contributions he would send to the "Cause".
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