Europe court dismisses claim Omagh bombing trial was 'unfair'

Europe's top rights court on Thursday dismissed an attempt by two men held liable for the 1998 Omagh bombing, the worst atrocity of the Northern Ireland Troubles, to have the civil ruling against them overturned.

No one has ever been convicted over the car bomb that ripped through the County Tyrone town on August 15, 1998, killing 29 people, including a woman pregnant with twins.

A civil case in 2009 held Michael McKevitt, founder of an Irish Republican Army (IRA) splinter group that claimed responsibility for the attack, and Liam Campbell liable for the carnage, along with two others.

The four men were ordered to pay damages of £1.6 million ($2.0 million, 1.8 million euros at today's exchange rates) to the victims' families.

McKevitt and Campbell complained their trial was unfair, saying that, given the gravity of the accusations, the Belfast court should have applied a criminal rather than civil standard of proof.

They also argued that admitting evidence from an FBI agent who had not been cross-examined in court was unjust.

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg dismissed their complaints, saying a civil case did not have to meet criminal standards and that the defendants had been given "adequate opportunity" to challenge the evidence from the FBI agent.

"In light of this, the Court found that the national court's findings could not be said to have been arbitrary or unreasonable," seven ECHR judges concluded in a unanimous ruling.

The Omagh bombing rocked Northern Ireland, coming just four months after nationalist and unionist parties had inked a peace deal ending the worst of the violence that had plagued the British province for three decades.

Two of the four men held liable for the attack -- Seamus Daly and Colm Murphy -- successfully had the ruling overturned and were ordered to face a retrial.

But their retrial ended with a similar finding of responsibility, with a Belfast High Court judge citing "overwhelming" evidence against them.

In 2014, Daly became the first man to be charged over the attack.

He was held in a high-security prison for nearly two years before being freed in March after the case against him collapsed.

Campbell and McKevitt, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence in Ireland for directing terrorism, have failed in all their attempts to have the civil finding of their responsibility overturned.

The ECHR's ruling is final.