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Buncrana mother backs Omagh
inquiry
03.03.10
by Damian Dowds, Inishowen Independent
BERNIE Doherty, whose son Oran was killed in Omagh
in August 1998, says she fears no one will ever be
brought to justice for the bombing that killed 29
people.
Colm Murphy was last week acquitted in the Special
Criminal Court on charges of conspiring to cause an
explosion in Omagh. To date, no one has been
convicted for direct involvement with the atrocity
in which 29 were killed and 200 injured. Three local
children, Oran Doherty (8), Sean McLaughlin (12) and
James Barker (12) were killed in the explosion.
Fernando Blasco Baselga (12) and Rocio Abad Ramos
(23), Spaniards on an exchange programme in
Buncrana, were also among the dead. |
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“It’s very
disheartening,” Mrs Doherty acknowledged at the
weekend. “Even before the retrial began in January,
I’d come to believe that there wasn’t going to be
any convictions. For some reason, they don’t seem to
want to convict anyone.”
Mrs Doherty supports calls |
by the Omagh Support
Group for a cross-border public inquiry into the
bombing and the circumstances that led to it.
“I know time has gone on and some people might
wonder why we’d bother, but we have lost a loved one
and we do want someone to be brought to justice,”
she said. “We want to know all the details of what
happened. You hear different stories, and that
certain people know who did it, and you want to hear
it for yourself, so yes, I would support a public
inquiry.”
“Time has gone on. For other people, it was
something that happened 12 years ago, but we’re
living with it all the time, and our family lives
with it. Our wee boy’s life was taken and nobody has
been brought to justice for it.”
Mrs Doherty says the failure to secure convictions
for those involved in Omagh may have contributed to
a feeling among dissident republicans that they can
behave with impunity.
“What’s it going to take?” she asked. “Will it need
another big bombing? That bomb in Newry could have
killed a lot of people. I just wish they would stop.
“After Omagh, people said that would be the end of
it. It turned people against those that carried out
the bombing. But these ones must not have any
remorse for Omagh. I just wish they would stop
before they kill more innocent people. They have
killed and injured people, like the policeman
earlier this year, and the young man in Derry last
week.
“He was one of them, but what gives them the right
to kill him in the way they did?
I wish they would sit and think about what they’re
doing, and go down the path of peace like the others
have.
“They’ll say they’re fighting for a cause, and that
they want the British out of Ireland. But will other
innocent lives be lost? Are they going to keep
killing innocent people? I don’t think they can get
what they want through violence.” |
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