BBC: UK spies monitored Omagh bombers' phones

British authorities recorded conversations between those responsible for the Omagh bombing - Northern Ireland's worst terrorist atrocity - on the day of the attack, the British Broadcasting Corp. reported Sunday.

The bomb exploded Aug. 15, 1998, on a crowded street, killing 29 people and injuring 220. Among the dead were three generations of one family, including a woman eight months pregnant with twins, more than a dozen children and two Spanish tourists.

The Real IRA - a breakaway group of the Provisional IRA - claimed responsibility, but no one has ever been convicted.

Britain's electronic eavesdropping service, called the Government Communications Headquarters, had been monitoring cell phones at the behest of anti-terrorism police when the conversations were picked up, the BBC said.

The bombers were recorded as they drove two cars - one of them loaded with 500 pounds of explosives - into Northern Ireland. The BBC said it was not clear whether the eavesdropping service listened to the conversations live or whether it recorded them so they could be listened to later.

The BBC said the calls between the bombers included the words "the bricks are in the wall" - code meaning the car bomb was parked and primed for detonation. The same code had been recorded by the intelligence agency before an earlier bombing, the BBC said.

Phone and e-mail messages left with the Government Communications Headquarters' press office were not immediately returned Sunday.

Former Northern Ireland police ombudsman, Nuala O'Loan, said that had the intelligence agency been monitoring the bombers' progress live, the attack might have been thwarted.

"There are a very limited number of access routes to Omagh town," she said. "And if they came to the view that that was where a device was being taken, it would seem to me there could have been roadblocks set up."

The BBC reported that while transcripts of the bombers' conversations were written up within hours of the blast, anti-terrorism police did not get them until three days later.

Even then, the BBC reported, records suggest police passed the information on to detectives investigating the case three weeks after the blast. The information had been heavily censored, the BBC said, hampering the investigation.

Although police say they have identified most of the people responsible, nobody has been convicted. A probe led by O'Loan harshly criticized the police investigation into the bombing for failing to preserve forensic evidence and pursue potential leads.

British law bars intelligence intercepts like the ones gathered by the eavesdropping service from being used in court, but the BBC said nothing stopped the transcripts from being shared with detectives so they could mine them for leads.

Northern Ireland's former Assistant Chief Constable Ray White told the BBC that sharing the information with investigators immediately "would have been, in a sense, manna from heaven," because better arrests could have been made earlier.

Michael Gallagher, whose son died in the bombing and who now chairs the Omagh Support and Self Help Group, said he hoped the report would add weight to his call for a public inquiry into the bombing.

His group is suing the five men they allege planned and carried out the bombing, with a judgment expected by year's end. The BBC said the group would seek to force the disclosure of the phone transcripts next week.