Witnesses at the Omagh inquest described a relaxed mood among those in the town before the blast, with few people believing the bomb warnings to be genuine.
Traffic warden Ms Marguerita Larsen told the inquest that during the period before the blast "nobody seemed to think there was a bomb. There was quite a light-hearted atmosphere." She said that although she was directing traffic away from the main street, "it never entered my mind that there might be a bomb". There had been bomb alerts in the past. "Over the years, there have been quite a few that came to nothing," she said.
Ms Larsen spoke of people continuing to park their cars in spite of the alert, with a number of them running into the Salad Bowl coffee shop, one of the shops closest to the bomb, moments before it went off.
Ms Larsen told the inquest that earlier during the period of the warning she spoke to a party of Spanish students farther up the street. "Then one of the youth leaders called the children and they walked towards Market Street," she said.
Ms Larsen then went to the junction of Market Street and Dublin Road to help redirect the traffic. She agreed with coroner Mr John Leckey that this was "just a few doors from where the bomb went off". The explosion blew her forward, and she injured her hand. She spoke of how the car at the front of a queue of traffic "seemed to shrink" in the blast. "Its windows shattered and its panels bent inwards," she said.
The lack of concern prior to the explosion was also evident in the testimony of another witness. Const Keith Hutchinson described how drinkers and shoppers on Bridge Street, close to where the bomb was believed to be, were slow to respond to calls to move. "They were very reluctant to move further; they thought that it was a bomb scare. It took a lot of shouting to persuade them," he said.
Const Hutchinson said that when the bomb went off his first reaction was to look up the street to the courthouse, the opposite direction from the explosion.
Const Hutchinson quickly drove to the scene of the bombing. As he neared it, he saw "lots of people running in all directions, some injured and some in shock". He said he saw "a young female in her mid-teens with dark hair lying dead in the rubble". A ginger-haired man in his early 20s with severe head injuries lay face up in the middle of the street a few feet from where the car bomb had exploded. The witness said he could identify the man as Mr Adrian Gallagher.
Const Hutchinson described how he dealt with dozens of the injured, helping them into vehicles. He helped one injured woman, who had had most of her clothes and underwear blown off, into a minibus which took her to hospital. After encountering a woman screaming for her baby, he went to search for it. He moved a fallen shop shutter and found three people in the rubble.
"There was a male who started moaning when I spoke to him and an elderly female who was lying across his legs," he said. "She started to moan when I moved the rubble and I saw she had a severe injury to one of her feet." The third person was a female lying chest down, but "when I went to move her, I realised she had been decapitated," Const Hutchinson said.
Later, when "all the casualties had been removed to hospital and all that remained were remains", he covered two or three bodies lying in the street.
Another officer, Const Gary Harkness, had been searching vehicles near the courthouse at the top of the street. He had believed the bomb to be in that area.
"In my lifetime, there have been at least two explosions at [the] courthouse. That is where I expected it to be," he told the coroner. "I would consider it the focal point of the town and a Crown target."
Const Harkness spoke of treating many of the injured after the blast. "The majority of casualties I treated had suffered horrific injuries," he said. "At least two people lay under the engine block of a car and at least one of these was alive. Most of their clothes had been blown off, and other officers and civilians were trying to get it [the engine block] off," he said.
Before the inquest sat at Omagh Town Leisure Centre, the coroner and the families' legal representatives walked around the site of the explosion in the town centre. None of the victims' families chose to join the tour.