COUNSEL FOR one of four dissident republicans held liable for the Omagh bombing has claimed the case against his client was based on the testimony of a “pathological liar”.
Michael McKevitt was found liable for the Real IRA atrocity along with Liam Campbell, Séamus Daly and Colm Murphy in a civil case taken by 12 relatives of the dead which concluded in June 2009.
McKevitt, currently serving a 20-year prison term for directing terrorism, is appealing the civil case finding along with the three others. Relatives of the 29 dead which included a woman pregnant with twins are also appealing for more punitive damages than the £1.6 million awarded.
Michael O’Higgins SC, counsel for McKevitt, told an appeal hearing in Belfast yesterday that the criminal evidence against his client came from FBI agent David Rupert who was “a liar, trickster and perjurer”.
Beginning his two-day submission to the three appeal judges, Mr O’Higgins said his client’s case rested on 10 grounds. Referring to the testimony used to convict him in his criminal case taken in the Republic in 2003, he said Mr Rupert’s evidence was unreliable.
Mr Rupert was asked to infiltrate dissident republican groups and, while he testified against McKevitt in his criminal case heard in Dublin in 2003, he did not give evidence to the civil hearing.
Mr O’Higgins told the Appeal Court that the inability to cross-examine Mr Rupert on the basis of the evidence he gave to the criminal case meant that the civil findings against McKevitt were tainted and therefore flawed.
He told Lord Justices Higgins, Coghlin and Girvan he would go through the civil case findings to highlight their deficiency. He further told them that the civil case judge, Mr Justice Morgan, had acted irrationally in accepting that Mr Rupert had been a credible witness and claimed that the former agent was a flawed character.
Mr O’Higgins said Mr Rupert had, courtesy of a financial incentive, “a huge motive” to exaggerate. He told the court that the former agent’s moral focus was questionable and illustrated this by claiming Mr Rupert was involved in mortgage fraud. He further told the appeal judges that an earlier decision to attach different levels of importance to the decisions by Mr Rupert and McKevitt not to testify was “perverse”.
The former agent’s non-appearance was treated as lacking significance, but for McKevitt the consequences were “catastrophic”.
The relatives took their landmark civil case following the failure to secure any criminal prosecutions. Co Louth publican Colm Murphy was convicted in connection with the bombing but he was subsequently cleared by a retrial in the Republic. South Armagh electrician Seán Hoey was charged in Northern Ireland with the murders and a host of other charges. He was cleared by Belfast Crown Court in 2007.
Lawyers for Daly, Campbell and Murphy are expected to make representations on their clients’ behalf later. The appeal proceedings are expected to take two weeks.
Speaking outside the court Stanley McCombe, whose wife Ann was killed in the bombing, said: “This is just another day in the history of Omagh. It doesn’t get any easier, travelling up you start to again contemplate what’s going to happen. We’ve been doing this for a long time unfortunately, but we have to be here.
“A lot of families are not happy with what’s going on but at the same time there’s nothing we can do, that’s the legal system, that’s the way it goes.”