From Bali to Mumbai the message went out around the world from Belfast last night that terrorists can in future be successfully pursued by their victims through the courts.
A landmark ruling in which four men and the Real IRA were held liable for Northern Ireland’s worst terrorist atrocity will give belief that civil actions can succeed against perpetrators when the traditional route of criminal prosecution has failed.
Jubilant relatives of the Omagh victims, who decided eight years ago to take civil action after the failure of the authorities to deliver them justice, declared themselves satisfied that they had won a significant moral victory. They accept that it is highly unlikely they will ever receive a penny from the four Irish republicans or the Real IRA.
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Mr Justice Declan Morgan awarded more than £1.6 million in damages to 12 named relatives of 29 people, including a pregnant mother carrying twin girls, who were killed in the Real IRA attack. The families said last night that they would still go to the Court of Appeal to challenge Mr Justice Morgan’s decision that it was not appropriate for him to order the payment of exemplary damages also.
He did rule that Michael McKevitt, the Real IRA founder and leader who is serving a 20-year prison sentence in the Republic of Ireland for directing terrorism, was liable for the Omagh bombing. Also found liable were Liam Campbell, Colm Murphy and Seamus Daly.
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The ruling opens the way for further legal actions to be started in Dublin. All four men named by the judge yesterday live in the Republic.
However, the four have had eight years in which to prepare for yesterday’s judgment and it is unlikely that any of them will pay the damages.
Victor Barker, whose 12-year-old son, James, was killed in the attack, told The Times: “We’ve finally achieved some justice for the families. I will never get over the loss of my son, but I have done what I could for him and I’m proud that I stood up for him.”
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He said that Tony Blair, the Prime Minister at the time, had pledged to convict the killers, leaving not one stone unturned. “Well, he clearly did because the families had to pick up all those stones and bring them to court.”
Mr Justice Morgan said yesterday that it was clear that McKevitt was a senior figure in the republican terrorist organisation — which split away from the Provisional IRA in 1997 — at the time of the bombing and was heavily involved in the procurement of explosives. Murphy was found guilty in 2003 in the Dublin Special Criminal Court of conspiring to cause the Omagh bomb but his conviction was later quashed.
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A fifth man, Seamus McKenna, was cleared of involvement. The Real IRA group itself also was found liable. The only man to face criminal charges over the Omagh massacre, Sean Hoey, 38, from Jonesborough, South Armagh, was acquitted in December 2007. The civil action lawsuit cost about £2 million and took eight years to bring to fruition.
Mr Justice Morgan took three months to sift through the evidence and produce his judgment that the case was proved against the four men, none of whom attended the hearings. He based much of his verdict on evidence obtained by David Rupert, an undercover FBI agent.
In his ruling Mr Justice Morgan said it was clear that the bombers’ primary objective was to ensure that their device exploded without detection, with the safety of the public in Omagh “at best a secondary consideration”.
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Indeed, the telephone warnings given were “purposely designed to prevent detection of the location of the bomb car”.
He added: “Those involved in the planning, preparation, planting and detonation of the bomb recognised the likelihood of serious injury or death from its detonation but decided to take that risk.”
He found that records for a mobile phone registered to Murphy showed “a clear direction of travel from . . . the general vicinity in which the bomb car was stolen, to Omagh” in the hours before the explosion.
There was an “irresistible inference” that it and two other phones were used in the bomb run.
He said that the case against McKevitt depended upon the hearsay evidence of Mr Rupert. Considering the 2,293 pages of e-mails exchanged between Mr Rupert and his handlers and Mr Rupert and McKevitt, the judge said that the “extraordinary level of detail . . . is compelling evidence” of the accuracy of the FBI’s record of his meetings with the Real IRA’s leader.
In addition, Mr Rupert and a Garda inspector had identified the voice of a Real IRA representative calling himself “Karl” during telephone conversations between him and Security Service agents as belonging to McKevitt.
A vital plank of the case against the men was records and traces on two phones used by the bombers on the day of the attack. The judge said evidence proved that Campbell and Daly were in possession of the phones before and after the attack.