A committee of MPs today criticised the British government’s response to the Omagh bomb inquiry.
A Northern Ireland Affairs Committee report expressed disappointment and called for clarification about whether a public inquiry into the 1998 Real IRA attack would be ordered.
Twenty-nine people, including a mother pregnant with twins, died in the attack on August 15th, 1998. No-one has been convicted of the murders.
The committee described Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s refusal to allow the committee chairman access to a full report by intelligence chief Sir Peter Gibson on intercept intelligence available at the time of the explosion as unreasonable.
It also said the government had failed to respond to the committee’s concerns about the limits of Sir Peter’s investigation. “Instead the government has sought to criticise a journalist for protecting his sources, which misses the committee’s point entirely,” the committee said.
The committee has called for a fresh investigation into whether the state withheld vital information from detectives hunting the Omagh bombers.
Key questions which needed to be addressed include whether the attack could have been prevented and whether enough was done to catch the killers after the explosion.
The committee wanted to establish how much the security services knew about the killers’ movements at the time of the bombing.
The committee undertook an inquiry into the security services' role after claims in a BBC Panorama documentary that the Government's listening station GCHQ had monitored suspects' mobile phone calls as they drove to Omagh from the Republic on the day of the atrocity.
The Panorama programme said this information was never passed to Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) detectives assigned to the case.
Today's committee report - The Omagh Bombing: Government Response - said members remained of the view that this refusal is unreasonable, and again asked that the Gibson review of intelligence intercepts on the Omagh bombing be made available to the chairman.
The government said it would await the outcome of the Bloody Sunday Inquiry and a separate review on dealing with the past before deciding on a public inquiry for Omagh.