by Our Foreign Desk

NORTHERN Irish prosecutors dropped charges against alleged Omagh bomber Seamus Daly yesterday after he had spent nearly two years on remand.

The Public Prosecution Service (PPS) officially withdrew the case against the Armagh bricklayer during a routine magistrate’s hearing at Ballymena courthouse in Co Antrim.

Mr Daly was later released from Maghaberry prison.The horrific 1998 bomb attack carried out by dissident republican group the Real IRA on the Sinn Fein electoral stronghold claimed 29 lives.

Among them were both loyalists and republicans, two Spanish tourists and a woman pregnant with twins.

However, the security forces were subsequently criticised for failing to act on intelligence prior to the bombing and for their botched investigation following it.

In 2001, MI5 informant Kevin Fulton revealed that he had warned his handlers three days before the attack that the Real IRA was about to bring a “huge bomb” over the border from the Irish republic.

In December of that year, Police Ombudsman Nuala O’Loan lambasted the Royal Ulster Constabulary for ignoring warnings and failing to adequately investigate the crime.

She concluded: “The victims, their families, the people of Omagh and officers of the RUC were let down by defective leadership, poor judgement and a lack of urgency.”

Builder and publican Colm Murphy, from Co Louth in the republic, was convicted of conspiracy in relation to the bombing in 2002 but freed on appeal three years later.

In 2013, a judge ordered Mr Daly and three others to pay the bereaved families damages worth £1.6 million after they were found liable in a civil case.

Family and friends who had been campaigning for Mr Daly’s release said he had been “interned” for 23 months.

A statement from the Release Seamus Daly group said: “The case against Seamus Daly has been flawed from the beginning.

“For the last 18 years, Seamus and his family have been harassed by state agencies and media north and south due to the corruption and ineptitude of the investigators into the Omagh bomb.”

Michael Gallagher, whose son Aiden was killed in the attack, said: “We have been failed once again by the police service, by the prosecution service, by the government and by the criminal justice system.”