A second woman injured in the Omagh bombing today said she felt humiliated when forced to undress to her underwear during her compensation hearing in a Belfast court.
Twenty-nine people and two unborn babies died and hundreds were injured in the Omagh bomb blast in August 1998 when the Real IRA detonated a car bomb.
Mrs Mary Ellis said she had to strip to her underwear during her claim which was heard by four men and two women last October.
Earlier this week Mrs Rosemary Ingram said she’d been humiliated at what she called the degrading manner in which she had to "strip to prove" her injuries to a group of six lawyers, three of them men and three women.
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Mrs Ellis was injured in her shoulder and leg and her eardrums were perforated. She said four of her friends died in the blast, one of whom was blown against her.
Mrs Ellis, who had to retire from work because of her injuries, said that such was the "degrading the humiliating" procedure at her compensation hearing last October, that she wished she too had died in the blast.
"I had been told that I would be examined and that I would have to undress, but I honestly thought it would be done by doctors or nurses.
"After I’d taken off my clothes down to my bra and panties, these four men and a woman, all of them strangers, walked into the room and started looking down at me. One of the men came forward and pulled the right hand side of my bra strap down to look closely at my shoulder wound.
"All my medical records were in front of the assessors and why he had to do that I don’t know. It would have been different if he was a doctor or a nurse, but he wasn’t. What was he able to tell by a close examination of my shoulder wound?
"I was totally humiliated and degraded. I couldn’t understand why they had to see me in a state of undress down to my underwear. They made me feel almost like a prisoner. I felt they were blaming me for being in Omagh at the time of the explosion.
"I felt awful. I started shouting at them to keep the money and I put my clothes on and left the room. I shouted to my solicitor to take me out of there, I just couldn’t take any more. He persuaded me to go back in but it was still a dreadful ordeal.
"I was in pieces for days after it. It is terrible that anyone has to go through that. I’m still going through a lot since that explosion and I can’t cope on my own any more", said Mrs Ellis.