Bring my brother’s killers to justice
20 years after Omagh bomb comes heart-rending plea
THE brother of a 12-year-old victim of the Omagh bombing has called for the killers to face justice nearly 20 years after the attack.
Oliver Barker called for anyone with information to ‘do the honourable thing’ as he visited the spot where his brother James died.
James, one of the youngest victims killed by the 500lb car bomb planted by the Real IRA, had been on a coach trip.
Next week will mark the 20th anniversary of the bombing which killed 29 people, including a woman pregnant with twins. It was more deadly than any other single event during the Troubles.
Mr Barker was four when his brother was killed and said he found a recent visit, with his mother, to the scene of the blast ‘hugely cathartic’. His father, Victor Barker, played a key role in launching the Omagh families’ campaign, backed by the Daily Mail, which helped raise £2million for a landmark civil action to bring the killers to justice. Daily Mail readers helped raise £1.2million with the Government later providing the extra £800,000 needed to bring the case to court.
In an historic victory in 2009, victims’ families were awarded more than £1.6million in damages against four Real IRA members. A Belfast judge ruled Real IRA godfather Michael McKevitt, lieutenant Liam Campbell and two other republican dissidents, Colm Murphy and Seamus Daly, were behind the attack.
But no one has been convicted in the criminal courts. The trial of the last remaining suspect, bricklayer Seamus Daly, collapsed in 2016 where prosecutors blamed a lack of evidence.
In 2007, South Armagh electrician Sean Hoey, who was then 38 and from Jonesborough, Co Armagh, was found not guilty of the 29 murders after a trial at Belfast Crown Court.
The families of the victims have continued their attempts to overturn the Government’s decision not to hold a public inquiry into claims the attack could have been prevented if it had not been for a series of intelligence failings.
Mr Barker said the lack of convictions had been ‘very frustrating,’ especially given the number of people likely to have withheld crucial information about the atrocity. ‘I think it’s almost definitive that that’s the case,’ he said, as he urged anyone with information ‘to do the honourable thing and to come forward’.
‘ The names, the places, the times. So that the criminal justice system can run its course and so the families could get the justice that they need.’
Mr Barker, now a 24-year- old estate agent who lives in Surrey, said he will spend the August 15 anniversary with his family.