DNA, fibre and voice evidence as well as the method of bomb manufacture will link Seán Hoey to the Omagh bombing and other dissident republican attacks in 1998, Belfast Crown Court was told yesterday.
The trial of Mr Hoey from Molly Road, Jonesborough, Co Armagh, finally opened yesterday more than eight years after the Real IRA bombing in Omagh on August 15th, 1998, that killed 29 people, including a woman pregnant with twin girls.
Many of the relatives of the victims were in the court for the case even though a special court video link has been set up at Omagh College for the families.
For the most part the relatives kept their composure, apart from the period when prosecution lawyer Gordon Kerr QC, in his opening address, outlined on a map displayed on a computer screen the positions on Market Street in Omagh where their loves ones died in the explosion.
As the names were read - starting with 17-year-old Brenda Logue from Carrickmore, Co Tyrone, and ending with the 29th victim, 61-year-old John McGrath from Omagh - relatives could be heard quietly sobbing in the courtroom.
Mr Kerr told the court how in three attacks - at Lisburn, Armagh police station, and Omagh - the dissidents provided a warning with the code word Martha Pope, a reference to the senior US official who was Senator George Mitchell's most senior aide in the talks leading to the Belfast Agreement.
He said the warnings for Omagh were so inadequate as to be "meaningless".
Because of the confusion of the three warnings provided for Omagh, the police understood that the bomb was located near Omagh courthouse on High Street. Police clearing the area, unwittingly and because of the nature of the warnings, actually directed people to where the bomb was planted at Market Street, thinking they were leading them to safety.
Mr Kerr said one witness would tell the court she saw two men getting out of the bomb car just over an hour before the explosion. They "appeared to be in a hurry" was her recollection. "One of the men caught her eye and grinned at her," said the QC. Mr Kerr in his opening also referred to 12 bombings and attempted and hoax bombings carried out by dissidents during 1998, specifically commenting about the timer power units (TPUs) used in the attacks which worked on an electromechanical time switch with a one or two-hour time delay.
He detailed how in 10 of these incidents all the TPUs were the same. He said they were "mark 19" TPUs, which appeared during 1998 contained in plastic lunch boxes. He explained that the TPUs used an electro-mechanical run back timer made by the French company, Coupatan, and that this Coupatan timer - 480 of which were bought from the company by a purchaser using a fictitious Dundalk company address - was a feature of these 10 attacks.
Expert evidence would be provided indicating that one person rather than a number of people were involved in making these bombs, he added.
The senior counsel also referred to the discovery of fibres from a number of bomb scenes which were compared with fibres taken from a premises and mobile home at Molly Road, Jonesborough, linked to Hoey.
Referring specifically to the foiled Lisburn bomb attack in April 1998, he said evidence would show that "four fibres from the TPU in the Lisburn case were indistinguishable from five fibres recovered from the mobile home".
Mr Kerr said there was also DNA evidence linking Mr Hoey to the Lisburn bomb, and also to other attacks.
"DNA matches with the defendant were found on a number of places on a number of devices.
"It is submitted that the extent of the DNA findings is such as to exclude the reasonable possibility that the findings can be explained in an innocent way."
Mr Kerr said that a voice analyst would contend that a recorded telephone warning about a dissident bombing in Banbridge, Co Down, two weeks before Omagh was "more likely than not" the voice of Mr Hoey.
"The prosecution will say that both DNA evidence and fibre evidence connecting the defendant in this series of attacks will show his involvement in them and that the totality of this evidence will persuade the court of his criminal involvement in the connected series of explosions," said Mr Kerr.
