{"id":62810,"date":"2026-10-15T17:27:42","date_gmt":"2026-10-15T17:27:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/omagh-bombing-inquiry-fair-chance-bomb-may-have-been-prevented-senior-officer-tells-inquiry\/"},"modified":"2026-10-15T17:27:42","modified_gmt":"2026-10-15T17:27:42","slug":"omagh-bombing-inquiry-fair-chance-bomb-may-have-been-prevented-senior-officer-tells-inquiry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/omagh-bombing-inquiry-fair-chance-bomb-may-have-been-prevented-senior-officer-tells-inquiry\/","title":{"rendered":"Omagh Bombing Inquiry: ‘Fair chance’ bomb may have been prevented, senior officer tells inquiry"},"content":{"rendered":"


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Baroness O’Loan said she was never told about that warning, and would have considered it important.<\/p>\n

“I would have remembered that.<\/p>\n

“It was very relevant to what we were investigating, we obviously had no jurisdiction over anybody in the Republic of Ireland, nor did we have any jurisdiction over the military, but apart from that, yes, of course it was relevant.<\/p>\n

“And where had you been able to put it together with other intelligence it might have been particularly relevant.”<\/p>\n

When invited to question Baroness O’Loan the senior counsel for the police said he had been given “clear instructions to ask his questions in a non-adversarial way”.<\/p>\n

He took issue with how her evidence represented how the police had responded to a warning call received by Omagh RUC on 4 August 1993.<\/p>\n

On Wednesday, Baroness O’Loan had criticised the lack of action by the police calling their decision to dismiss it as “bizarre and absurd”<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The inquiry was shown a note outlining actions the police had taken in response to the warning call.<\/p>\n

But Baroness O’Loan said that such actions had not been shared with her, nor had she ever seen any documentation to prove it had happened.<\/p>\n

“An assertion of this nature is not sufficient to persuade me that something occurred and there should have been documentation which under-pinned this which would have convinced me this had been done.<\/p>\n

“It would be variety of documentation and I have seen no such evidence which leads me to the view that I find it difficult to accept that it did happen.”<\/p>\n

PSNI counsel also questioned her recollection of a meeting she detailed with the then Chief Constable Sir Ronnie Flanagan.<\/p>\n

But Baroness O’Loan was able to produce the handwritten notes from immediately after the meeting and it was shown to the inquiry.<\/p>\n

“Immediately after (the meeting) I came out I sat in my car seat I was distressed and thought I needed to write this down.”<\/p>\n

Counsel for the inquiry deemed her recollection to be correct.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n


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Baroness O’Loan said she was never told about that warning, and would have considered it important. “I would have remembered that. “It was very relevant to what we were investigating, we obviously had no jurisdiction over anybody in the Republic of Ireland, nor did we have any jurisdiction over the military, but apart from that, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":62811,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[3624,298,6684,7136,504,1456,3623,16737,681,962],"class_list":["post-62810","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-n-ireland","tag-bomb","tag-bombing","tag-chance","tag-fair","tag-inquiry","tag-officer","tag-omagh","tag-prevented","tag-senior","tag-tells"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62810","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62810"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62810\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":62812,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62810\/revisions\/62812"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/62811"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62810"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62810"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62810"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}