Omagh: Murphy release delayed

Colm Murphy, whose conviction for an offence connected with the Omagh bombing in 1998 was quashed by the Court of Criminal Appeal last week, remained in custody today after a technical hitch held up his expected release on bail.

Murphy will have to go to the Court of Criminal Appeal on Friday for new bail conditions before he can be released.

He appeared briefly at the Special Criminal Court in Dublin today where his counsel Mr Richard Humphreys BL told the court that the Court of Criminal Appeal had set bail terms at a cash lodgement of €50,000 and two independent sureties of €25,000 each.

Mr Humphreys said that one surety was Murphy’s daughter Ms Leonora Murphy with an address at Ravensdale, Co Louth but the second proposed surety was Murphy’s sister Ms Kathleen Tully who has an address at Main St, Belleeks, Co Armagh, which is outside the jurisdiction.

Mr Humphreys said it was proposed that since Ms Tully lived outside the jurisdiction she would lodge the €25,000 in court as part of the bail conditions.

But Mr Justice Diarmuid O’ Donovan, presiding, said that the court did not have the power to alter the bail terms set by the Court of Criminal Appeal. The judge said that Murphy would have to go back to the Court of Criminal Appeal and seek to have the terms of bail altered to allow for a cash lodgement to replace the surety.

The court approved Ms Leonora Murphy as a surety for Murphy and Mr Justice O’ Donovan said that the court would have ``no problem’’ with accepting the new bail conditions and releasing Murphy on bail.

The court also ordered that a building society account held by Ms Leonora Murphy should be frozen and should not be allowed to go below €25,000.

Mr Humphreys said that as part of the bail conditions Murphy would reside at The Plaster, Mountpleasant, Dundalk and he said that his passport had already been surrendered to the prison authorities when he was in custody. Murphy also has to sign on daily at Dundalk garda station.

Counsel for the State, Mr Tom O’ Connell SC, said that Murphy’s retrial could not go ahead until the trial of two gardai for perjury had been disposed of.

The court remanded Murphy until April 5 next when his case will be mentioned again.

Murphy was jailed for 14 years by the Special Criminal Court in January 2002 for his role in the Omagh bomb which killed 29 people, including a mother pregnant with twins, and injured over 300 in 1998.

He was the first person to be convicted in either the Republic or Northern Ireland in connection with the Real IRA bombing, the worst terrorist atrocity in the history of the thirty years of the troubles.

But last week the Court of Criminal Appeal overturned the conviction and ordered a retrial after finding that the court of trial had failed to give proper regard to altered garda interview notes and that there had been ``an invasion of the presumption of innocence'' in the judgement on Murphy.

During a 25-day trial in 2001 and 2002, Murphy,(52), a father of four, building contractor and publican who is a native of Co Armagh with an address at Jordan's Corner, Ravensdale, Co Louth had pleaded not guilty to conspiring in Dundalk with another person not before the court to cause an explosion in the State or elsewhere between August 13 and 16, 1998.

The court found that Mr Murphy loaned his mobile phone and another mobile phone he obtained from Mr Terence Morgan to the people who planted the Omagh bomb.