An RUC control room officer told the Omagh bombing inquest yesterday that he had no knowledge of any bomb-warning code words, including the one used before the Omagh explosion.
"No code words have ever been given to us," said Constable Gary Murphy, who was on duty at Coleraine RUC station communications room on August 15th, 1998, the day the "Real IRA" car bomb killed 29 people. Constable Murphy said that at about 2.30 p.m. he received an emergency 999 call from the Samaritans in Coleraine about a telephone warning they had received that a bomb was to go off in the centre of Omagh about 200 yards from the courthouse in 30 minutes' time.
He immediately telephoned Omagh RUC communications room to give them the text of this message, and he then put the information on to the computer system, called Atlas Command and Control.
The computer record showed the incident automatically tagged on the system at 14.38, and at 14.39 recorded that the details had been passed to Omagh communications by telephone.
In reply to the coroner, Mr John Leckey, the witness agreed that he was based in Coleraine at the time and did not know the layout of Omagh town centre.
He told Mr Michael Mansfield QC, representing the next-of-kin of Elizabeth Rushe, that when he spoke to Omagh the controller there already knew of a bomb warning of 30 minutes and that it had been revised to 15 minutes in a subsequent call. His own call to the Omagh controller would have been at about 2.34 p.m.
He told Mr Barry Fox, solicitor, for the next-of-kin of a number of bomb victims, that he had no knowledge of what was meant by "Martha Pope" or "Malta Pope", which was the code word mentioned.
Constable Murphy said there might be police officers of a different rank or branch who knew of code words, but he had no knowledge concerning them.
However, he said, the presence or absence of a code word did not influence his response to bomb warnings - the code word mentioned in the Omagh incident had made no difference to his response.
Earlier, the hearing was told by Mrs Gemma Loughran, counsel to the coroner, that there had been notification from the Police Federation that morning that legal representation was being arranged for individual police officers giving evidence, and those lawyers would be in attendance at the hearings shortly.
Tape recordings of the telephone calls to the RUC and to the Samaritans in which the bomb warnings were given were played at the hearing.
In cross-examination of Constable Murphy by Mr Fox, objections to the line of questioning were raised on behalf of some of the families, including the next-of-kin of Debra-Ann Cartright, the daughter of a serving RUC officer, who was killed in the beauty shop in which she worked in Omagh.
It was submitted that the families felt the cross-examination of individual police officers should not proceed until the lawyers arranged by the Police Federation were in attendance to protect their interests.
However, the coroner said he did not regard Mr Fox's questioning as being acrimonious or aggressive in any way. Constable Murphy also indicated that he had no objection to his cross-examination proceeding.