BACKGROUND:The Omagh bombing joins a long list of atrocities for which no one has been convicted, CAROL COULTERLegal Affairs Editor
THE ISSUE of falsified Garda notes has dogged both trials of Colm Murphy in connection with the Omagh bombing. “There is no evidence before the court upon which a jury, properly charged, could convict the accused.” With these words Mr Justice Butler, presiding over the three-judge Special Criminal Court, directed that Colm Murphy should be acquitted of the charge of conspiracy to cause an explosion in Omagh in August 1998.
The sole evidence before the court connecting him to the Omagh bombing was that he had admitted in an interview with gardaí that he knew a phone he had lent to another man would be used to move bombs in Northern Ireland “to bomb targets”.
The judges found that this interview, and all the other interviews conducted by gardaí while Murphy was in detention, were not admissible because the notes of those conducted by two of the six interviewing gardaí had already been found to have been falsified.
This means that to date no one has been convicted in connection with the Omagh bombing, in which 29 people died and 200 were seriously injured, and it is increasingly unlikely anyone will be. Michael McKevitt is serving a 20-year sentence for IRA membership and directing terrorism, an offence introduced in legislation passed in the aftermath of the bombing, but not for an act directly related to it.
The Omagh bombing joins the litany of atrocities arising out of the North’s conflict for which no one has been convicted. Those initially convicted of the Birmingham and Guildford bombings were found to have been wrongly convicted, and no one else was ever charged, though an IRA team already convicted of another offence later admitted to the bombing of Guildford. No one was ever arrested, let alone charged, in connection with the Dublin and Monaghan bombings.
The pressure on the police in the aftermath of such atrocities to make arrests and find evidence on which to convict is intense.
In this case, two of the six gardaí involved in interviewing Colm Murphy in Monaghan Garda station on February 22nd, 1999, fabricated notes of the interview. This was discovered by a process called electrostatic document analysis, whereby sheets of notepaper are examined to show the indents made by writing on the sheets immediately above. This shows whether or not they were written in sequence.
This analysis revealed the fact that the third page of these notes was removed when it was discovered that it contained incorrect information about Murphy’s family, which therefore could not have been given by him. A different third page was substituted instead.
Although in Murphy’s first trial for conspiracy to cause explosions the Special Criminal Court did not consider the fabrication to be sufficient to lead to an acquittal, this view was not shared by the Court of Criminal Appeal, which ruled that the conviction should be quashed, and ordered a retrial.
The gardaí involved in the fabrication were charged with perjury in 2004, but they were acquitted by direction of the trial judge following three days of legal argument. Ironically, the judge ruled out documentary evidence of the fabrication on the grounds that the prosecution could not establish a chain of custody for the original interview notes or the document analysis.
This outcome, and the fact that the surviving member of the team, Garda John Fahy (Garda Liam Donnelly has since died), offered no explanation to the court for the fabrication of the notes, meant that it could not know whether any or all of the rest of the team were aware of the falsification or were part of some overall conspiracy, though the court stressed it made no finding in relation to the integrity of the other officers.