February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
Arms and legs blown off, faces and bodies torn by and embedded with shrapnel, smashed bones and extensive burns . . . the litany of horrific injuries caused by the Omagh blast just went on and on.
Seven women, including a pregnant woman, suffered abdominal, chest, neck, back, facial and upper and lower limb injuries, according the Irish Times reported.
The injured were rushed to hospitals throughout Northern Ireland. At Altnagelvin Hospital, in Derry, 22 people were detained — 12 women, two men and eight teenagers. Two women and one man had legs amputated.
In the Royal Victoria Hospital, in Belfast, 15 women, five men and two children were detained, several of them in critical condition.
At the Erne Hospital in Enniskillen, Co. Fermanagh, 24 patients were detained — 14 women, seven men, two girls and a boy.
In Tyrone County Hospital, in Omagh, 15 women, eight men and three children were recovering from abdominal and chest wounds. Ten patients were in South Tyrone Hospital in Dungannon.
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Dominic Pinto, a surgeon treating the wounded at Tyrone County Hospital, described the aftermath of Saturday’s bomb as a battlefield. "When I arrived at the hospital, there were so many people injured one didn’t know where to start."
At a press conference in the hospital on Sunday, Pinto, exhausted after working through the night, said it saddened him to think that people perpetrate such atrocity.
"I want to appeal to these people and say what they have gained by doing this. It is their own people that they are injuring and maiming."