THE Cheltenham-based electronic spying agency, GCHQ, recorded mobile phone exchanges between the Omagh bombers on the day of the attack in 1998.
The calls were monitored as the bombers, from the breakaway movement the Real IRA, drove the car bomb into the County Tyrone town.
The bomb blast, on August 15, 1998, killed 29 people.
Ray White, ex-Northern Ireland assistant chief constable, said the police Special Branch officer responsible for requesting GCHQ’s assistance was ‘adamant’ he had asked for live monitoring of mobile phone calls.
Two weeks before the Omagh bomb, the town of Banbridge in County Down was also hit by a car bomb attack, in which 38 people were injured.
In the minutes running up to the Banbridge attack, GCHQ recorded a phone exchange between the bombers, including the phrase ‘the bricks are in the wall’.
The same phrase was used in calls recorded in the run-up to the Omagh bomb: the question is whether the phone intercepts were ‘live’ or just recorded.
White said Special Branch members have told him they did not receive details of GCHQ intercepts until three days after the bombing.
And CID detectives later spent nine months trawling through 6.4 million telephone records, finally identifying 22 suspects’ phones active in Omagh and four other bombings.
Although this proved which mobiles had been in Omagh, prosecutors needed evidence of who had been using them before going to court.
Labour MP Andrew Mackinlay, a member of the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, said the revelations demanded a thorough investigation.
‘It is disgraceful that there is no parliamentary oversight of the intelligence and security services,’ he said, attacking the ‘shadowy and highly secret, so-called “Intelligence and Security Committee’’’.
‘Its existence,’ he said, ‘simply will not be sufficient to assuage grieving relatives, nor the public, that we were well served by our security services in this incident.’
The government declined to respond to detailed written questions about the revelations, which are the subject of a BBC ‘Panorama’ programme tonight.
