Police officers on duty on the day of the Omagh bombing have told the inquiry into the atrocity how they wrapped the dead in sheets and blankets and laid them out of sight in a nearby alleyway as carefully and gently as possible.
“We all felt a collective obligation to respect the dignity of those who had been lost,” Norman Haslett said.
A total of 31 people, including unborn twins, died and hundreds were injured when a car bomb planted by the dissident republican group the Real IRA exploded in the centre of the Co Tyrone town on August 15th, 1998.
An inquiry into the bombing is taking place in the Strule Arts Centre in Omagh.
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Mr Haslett, now a superintendent in the PSNI, described how he had accompanied two bodies to the temporary morgue at Lisanelly army barracks, and there had to search the victims for anything that would help identify them.
One of them, he said, was 12-year-old Fernando Blasco Baselga. “The only possession this beautiful wee boy had on him was a small, red Swiss army knife, which I found in one of his pockets.
“For me, as the first responder who had responsibility for looking after him after his death, Fernando and his Swiss army knife are the embodiment and the personification of the innocence that was lost as the result of the Omagh bombing,” he said.
Philip Marshall, the duty sergeant who directed the police operation at the site of the explosion, told the inquiry it was a “scene from hell” and it was immediately obvious there were “vast numbers of seriously injured and people who were obviously dead, and it just kept getting worse”.
Another police officer, Julian Elliot, told the inquiry how “the spirit of the people that passed, or angels” gave him the words to break the news to families that their loved ones were believed to be among the dead.
“I did not have the authority at the time to do that,” he said. “I decided to take my uniform head off and put my human head on. I thought that if I was one of these poor people, I would want to know.”
In a statement read to the inquiry on Tuesday, Mr Elliot said on the day of the bomb he was a sergeant in Omagh, and was put in charge of setting up the incident centre at Omagh Leisure Centre where people came for information about their missing loved ones.
The former sergeant said in the hours after the explosion, police faced a “stampede” of people whose relatives were missing and he went to the temporary mortuary at Lisanelly army barracks in search of information.
“It was a horrendous sight to see the bays lined out in the gym, right the way round it, with a body in each bay on a number,” he said.
“This went on all night, relaying death messages and trying to be as kind with my words and gentle as I could.”
Alan Palmer, who on the day of the bombing was a constable on mobile patrol in Omagh, described how he was evacuating Market Street when the bomb exploded.
“All I can recall is a flash of light, a great suction and a great, piercing pain in my back ... shards of glass from the shop windows fell into my back,” he said.
He remembered “seeing all the people who were in front of me lying dead, and those who remained alive had sustained serious injuries”.
Despite his own wounds, he tried to help a number of the injured. “There was a buggy lying close to the bomb site, but there was no child. I looked for the child, but to no avail.”
The then sergeant went to Omagh hospital in a police Land Rover with a number of other casualties. At the hospital, “a man approached my colleague and I before handing us the leg of a person wrapped in a blanket”, Mr Palmer said.
“We bought the leg into the accident and emergency department and handed it to a member of the medical team.”
The inquiry resumes on Wednesday.
