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Flanagan furious over Omagh report

February 16, 2011

By Staff Reporter

By Anne Cadwallader

BELFAST — A furious public row over policing in Northern Ireland is raging between the office of the police ombudsman and the chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland after the leaking of a report critical on the RUC’s handling of the 1998 Omagh bombing.

Some of the relatives bereaved in the bombing are now demanding a public inquiry into the report.

The British government has, so far, failed to back the report, which was leaked to the media on Dec. 7. It has instead asked people to read it closely and listen to both sides. John Reid, the Northern secretary of state, called for a period of reflection for people to digest the report without jumping to conclusions.

A former Northern secretary, Peter Mandelson, who is still considered close to the British prime minister, Tony Blair, was highly critical of the report, calling the ombudsman “nanve.”

The row could also split the 19-member Police Board down sectarian lines, with unionists supporting the police chief and nationalists vindicating the ombudsman’s recommendations, which include replacing the police officer heading the Omagh bomb investigation.

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The office of police ombudsman was proposed to hold the police publicly accountable. Its predecessor, the Independent Commission for Police Complaints, was regarded as toothless and ineffective.

The present Ombudsman is lawyer Nuala O’Loan. Her report claims that the Omagh bombing, which claimed the lives of 29 people in August 1998, might have been prevented had the police heeded warnings and that the subsequent investigation has been bungled, with the chances of convicting the killers damaged. The Real IRA carried out the attack.

The content and tone of her report outraged the chief constable, Sir Robbie Flanagan, who has been conducting an intensive media campaign to undermine O’Loan, while insisting in public that their relationship is one of mutual respect.

He began his fight-back by offering to commit “public suicide” if the report was shown to have been conducted fairly. Since then he has moderated his language but not the force of his rejection of the report, both in how it was conducted and its conclusions.

Apologizing for his suicide offer, Flanagan said: “It was an emotive statement that I wish I hadn’t made. It is illustrative of how deeply I felt about this, how deeply unfair I felt the approach to this investigation was, how flawed it was and how grievously wronged I felt.”

Relatives of the victims were stunned and furious when O’Loan went through her findings with them during a private four-hour meeting in Omagh before its public launch last Wednesday, with some calling for Flanagan’s immediate removal from office.

He hit back, castigating the Ombudsman as “wildly inaccurate” and threatening legal action to quash the report. Others have joined in the criticism, with Ken Maginnis of the Ulster Unionist Party likening O’Loan to a “suicide bomber”.

As the row escalated, O’Loan said Flanagan had still not provided her with details of the alleged inaccuracies in her report and she has remained steadfast in support of her investigating team, which includes former British police officers with long service.

“I have concluded with great sadness that the judgment and leadership of the chief constable has been seriously flawed,” she said. “As a result of that, the chances of detaining and convicting the Omagh bombers has been significantly reduced.

“The victims, their families and the officers of the RUC have been let down by the defective leadership, poor judgment and a lack of urgency.”

The report confirmed that the RUC Special Branch had failed to pass on two warnings to officers on the ground in Omagh in the days before the bombing, that none of the five people named in those warnings was ever questioned by police, and that the murder inquiry itself was littered with hundreds of mistakes.

O’Loan said Special Branch and the chief constable were reluctant to give her investigators access to intelligence material, and were “defensive and at times uncooperative.”

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