MI5 withheld important intelligence information from the RUC's Special Branch four months before the Real IRA Omagh bombing of August 1998, it has emerged.
Senior PSNI officers met the Omagh families on Wednesday and disclosed that information understood to have been provided to MI5 by FBI agent David Rupert, about an earlier planned attack on Omagh or Derry, was not handed on to the RUC, Omagh families' representative Michael Gallagher said yesterday.
Mr Gallagher said the families were told by the officers that in April 1998, MI5 learned from the FBI of a planned dissident republican bomb attack on either Omagh or Derry, with Omagh the most likely target. He understood the attack was to take place on April 9th, Holy Thursday 1998, the day before the signing of the Belfast Agreement.
This intelligence was passed to the Garda, which was able to arrest three of the suspected bomb team and disrupt the attack. Mr Gallagher said the families were told this on Wednesday by PSNI assistant Chief Constable Sam Kinkaid, who is about to retire, and Det Chief Supt Norman Baxter, who is in charge of the Omagh investigation.
Mr Gallagher said the families were told that the RUC Special Branch was not informed of the disrupted bomb attack on either Omagh or Derry in April 1998, nor was it informed in August that year directly after the Omagh bombing, which claimed the lives of 29 people, including a woman heavily pregnant with twin girls.
"I am not saying this information would have prevented the bombing but it could have done," said Mr Gallagher, whose son Aidan (21) was killed. "If MI5 had contacted the police in April 1998 at least they would have been on a state of alert for Omagh being targeted again.
"But neither was the information passed on after the bombing at a time when such vital intelligence could have been used to possibly arrest those responsible for the attack."
Mr Gallagher said the disclosure also raised questions for the Garda. "The primary obligation for passing on the information to the RUC lay with MI5, but the fact that there was no system of liaison to pass this information from the guards to the RUC, doesn't say much for the so- called excellent co-operation between the two forces," he said.
Well-placed sources said that FBI agent David Rupert, who had infiltrated the Real IRA and who had also worked for MI5 and the Garda Special Branch, was the source of the information about the dissident attack planned for Omagh or Derry in April 1998. Mr Rupert's evidence at the Special Criminal Court in Dublin in 2003 helped to jail Real IRA leader Michael McKevitt for 20 years.
Mr Gallagher called for a special cross-Border investigation to try to finally establish how and why "the Omagh bombing, before and after it happened, was so badly investigated". Labour TD Joe Costello supported this call.
These disclosures have emerged amid controversy over the planned handing over of strategic intelligence responsibility for British national security to MI5 from the PSNI.
SDLP leader Mark Durkan said: "This latest revelation underscores the case that MI5 cannot be trusted to work in the true public interest or relied upon to co-operate properly with other authorities."
He added: "Allowing MI5 to have a lead role in intelligence in Northern Ireland would be like appointing Herod as children's commissioner."
A PSNI spokeswoman said the transfer of national security intelligence responsibility to MI5 by the end of 2007 would be properly and carefully managed.
