Inspired in part by the successful civil action against O.J. Simpson in the killing of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, relatives of the victims of the worst terrorist attack in Northern Ireland’s history won a civil case on Monday against members of an Irish Republican Army (IRA) splinter group that the court found responsible for the attack.
In a ruling without precedent in a terrorism case in Britain, a High Court judge in Belfast found four members of the Real IRA and the organization itself responsible for the car bomb explosion in Omagh on a busy shopping day in August 1998 that killed 29 people, including two pregnant women. The judge, Declan Morgan, awarded the six families that brought the suit damages of US$2.6 million.
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The award was a fraction of the US$33.5 million in damages awarded by a California court against O.J. Simpson, a former football star, who was sued in the 1994 stabbing deaths of Nicole Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman. But the award set by the Belfast court was considered high by the precedents for civil actions involving deaths under British law, legal experts said.
Lawyers representing the families in the Omagh case said they started the civil action after years of frustration with the failed attempts of the British and Irish authorities to gain criminal convictions in the bombing, and because of the example set in the Simpson case. The prospects of winning a civil suit against the Real IRA group involved in the attack were enhanced by the lower standard of proof required in a civil case than in a criminal prosecution.
The men judged responsible for the bombing in the Belfast ruling were Michael McKevitt, 54-year-old founder of the Real IRA, who is a brother-in-law of Bobby Sands, and three other men: Liam Campbell, Colm Murphy and Seamus Daly. A fifth man, Seamus McKenna, was cleared on the grounds that the evidence against him was provided by his estranged wife, whom the judge considered an unreliable witness.
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All four of the men found responsible for the bombing in the Belfast ruling had been convicted and served prison terms for offenses related to IRA terrorism. Two of them, McKevitt and Campbell, are in prison; a third, Murphy, won an appeal against a 14-year sentence for conspiracy to cause the Omagh bombing and is awaiting a retrial.
McKevitt, from the Republic of Ireland, is serving a 20-year jail term imposed by an Irish court in 2003 for organizing terrorist activities for the Real IRA, an offense created in response to the Omagh bombing. He lost an appeal last year.
Members of the Omagh victims’ families who brought the civil case said the Belfast verdict had given them a degree of closure. Michael Gallagher, who lost his 21-year-old son in the bombing, said the result was “better than we could ever have imagined.”
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