Hoey waves as judge clears him on Omagh charges
A man was cleared today of murdering 29 people in the 1998 Omagh bomb atrocity.
Sean Hoey, 38, from Jonesborough, South Armagh, waved as relatives applauded his acquittal by a judge at Belfast Crown Court.
Mr Justice Weir said the evidence by the prosecution in the case did not meet the required standard.
Hoey was also cleared of a series of other charges linked to a number of bomb and murder attacks on police and military installations across Northern Ireland in the run-up to the Omagh atrocity, which was carried out in August 1998 by dissident republican group the Real IRA.
Hoey, who has been in custody for the last four years, will now be home before Christmas.
His acquittal means that nobody in the North and has yet been convicted of carrying out the single worst terrorist atrocity in more than 30 years of violence.
Hoey, dressed today in a grey and white open-necked shirt and charcoal jacket, was never called to give evidence at any stage during the trial even though he made statements to investigating police claiming that if his DNA was found on any evidence then it was either there innocently, or had been planted by police or some other agency.
Mr Justice Weir took just over an hour and a quarter to deliver his verdict which came at the end of a 36-day trial which finished last January.
He was highly critical of the forensic evidence presented by the prosecution. But he was not satisfied beyond a reasonable doubt that fibres found in glue used to assemble power units could be linked to the accused or to establish, as the prosecution had claimed, common authorship that the one person was involved.
The judge was also highly critical of the process of bagging, labelling and recording of exhibits and hit out at the “slapdash approach” and “cavalier disregard” the police and some forensic experts had for the integrity of forensic items.
The judge claimed that two police officers had told untruths in a deliberate attempt to beef up statements and said there had been a deliberate and calculated deception which made it impossible for him to accept their evidence.
