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Police draw fire in N. Ireland
A new report criticizing police handling of the Omagh bombing case triggers calls for an inquiry.
BELFAST, NORTHERN IRELAND
Policing - a key piece of "unfinished business" in the Northern Ireland peace process - is at the top of the political agenda here.
A devastating critique of police handling of the 1998 Omagh bombing case was issued last week. Also on Wednesday, a former police informer, who had claimed police failed to prevent the murder of a prominent Catholic lawyer 12 years ago, was slain.
The report and the slaying come just as Northern Ireland struggles to fully carry out the 1998 Good Friday peace agreement. The accords call for reforming the police force, including the semiautonomous Special Branch, which concentrates on information-gathering about illegal paramilitary groups, both Protestant and Catholic. This branch's conduct is at the center of the controversies over the Omagh bombing and the latest slaying.
The Omagh attack killed 31 people, the highest death toll in a single bombing in Northern Ireland, and the police promised "no stone would be left unturned" to convict the bombers. The dissident Catholic paramilitary group known as the "Real IRA," which split from the mainstream Irish Republican Army when its political wing, Sinn Fein, endorsed the Good Friday accord, claimed responsibility.
Last week, Northern Ireland's independent Police Ombudsman reported a litany of missed leads in the case, amounting to "flawed leadership" at the highest level in the Northern Ireland Police Service. The report raised the possibility that the bombing could have been averted if two warnings had been passed on by Special Branch officers to local police in Omagh. The report added that police failures have seriously hurt chances of ever finding the perpetrators.
The ombudsman, Nuala O'Loan, has come under heavy police and some political criticism for her report. Supported by some of Omagh's bereaved families and the injured, who are demanding a public inquiry, Mrs. O'Loan is standing by the conclusions of her investigators, who include former senior British police officers.
The report's publication came within hours of the killing of a former police informer, William Stobie, who had claimed publicly that his police "handlers" had failed to prevent the murder of a Catholic civil rights attorney 12 years ago. Mr. Stobie, a self-confessed Protestant paramilitary and police informer had said he had warned police that the lawyer, Pat Finucane, was to be murdered in 1989.
Stobie was the only person charged in the Finucane case. Acquitted two weeks ago, he would have been a key witness in any inquiry into the lawyer's murder. Catholics are demanding a public inquiry, while Protestants defend the police record on both handling informers and the Omagh bombing.
The row comes at a critical point in the transformation of the police department from the old, predominantly Protestant and quasi-paramilitary "Royal Ulster Constabulary" into the new, community-focused "Northern Ireland Police Service."
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