Omagh blast: Charges dropped against suspect

A British court on Tuesday dropped all charges against Seamus Daly, the only remaining suspect in Northern Ireland's 1998 Omagh bombing that killed 29 people and threatened a peace deal in the province.

A 2014 file photo of Seamus Daly, as he arrives in a police car at Dungannon Court, Northern Ireland.

Daly, a bricklayer, has been in prison for nearly two years after being charged over the atrocity committed by the Real IRA militant republicans - a splinter group of the Provision IRA (Irish Republican Army).

The case against him collapsed as prosecutors withdrew all charges after inconsistent evidence by a key witness in preliminary pre-trial hearings. The car bombing, which also injured around 220 people, was the single worst atrocity of the sectarian conflict known as The Troubles in which around 3 500 people were killed over three decades.

No-one has ever been convicted in a criminal court over the bombing, which tore through the market town of Omagh, testing the peace accords signed only months earlier to put an end to the conflict.

In 2009, the Belfast High Court found that Daly and three other men were liable in a civil case brought by families of the victims and they were later ordered to pay more than £1.6m in damages to the relatives.

Daly has always denied involvement in the bombing. "It's very painful, but on the evidence we've heard, I wouldn't want anyone to be convicted," Michael Gallagher, whose 21-year-old son Aiden was one of those killed in the bombing, told the BBC after Tuesday's decision.

"I feel that there has been a chance wasted here. There never was a political will to find the people responsible," he said.

Decision 'not taken lightly'
Acting on conflicting bomb warnings, police had moved shoppers and shop employees into a part of Omagh where a car packed with 225kg of explosives was parked, unwittingly putting them in close proximity to the huge blast.