AN EYE-WITNESS reported to police in the days after the 1998 Omagh Bomb atrocity she may have seen the car which carried the bomb to the town parked on Market Street 24 hours before the atrocity.
Details of the movements of the maroon Vauxhall Cavalier are being studied in detail by the Omagh Bombing Inquiry.
Chapter Three of the inquiry has been taking place in Belfast this week, and is due to continue until November.
One woman said she was walking down Market Street towards Campsie at 4pm on the afternoon of Friday August 14, 1998 – the day before the bomb attack.
She told the team investigating the bomb – which claimed the lives of 31 people, including a woman pregnant with twins – that the vehicle was parked outside the McElroy’s Shoe business.
The woman said it was the registration plates which had caught her attention.
Four numbers
The inquiry heard how she had thought that they were ‘plates from Co Antrim’ and that she believed there were four numbers on the plates as well.
The woman, who gave the interview a number of days following the atrocity, said the car ‘was not clean,’ but that she did not notice anyone inside the vehicle.
Eye-witness accounts also recalled the vehicle travelling along the main road from Aughnacloy to Omagh.
One man who was standing at a bus stop on the road between Fintona and Omagh said he remembered ‘a new type of model’ and thought it had looked ‘suspicious’. He said that it looked ‘very clean and shiny’.
The man went on to say that as he was standing near an old farmhouse ar around 8.45am on August 14, he could recall the ‘smell of fertiliser and chemicals’ which he had associated with the nearby derelict farmhouse.
Another witness said that they had remembered a maroon-coloured vehicle speeding past them travelling from Ballygawley roundabout towards Omagh with ‘about three people in it’. This was at around 1.30am on the morning of August 14.
Catching up
They then remembered catching up with the vehicle at Garvaghey. It pulled away from them again at what was then the Travellers Rest bar on the Curr Road.
The inquiry was told that the man had said to police he had ‘thought long and hard’ before going to them with his recollection.
Later that night, a man whose car was parked outside the Kozy Corner pub at Market Street in Omagh was getting into his vehicle when he saw a red maroon coloured Vauxhall Cavalier saloon-type driving up Market Street.
He said there were two people in the vehicle, and that it looked to have been freshly cleaned.
Other sightings of a maroon coloured Vauxhall Cavalier were reported later that night in South Armagh.
Among them was one person who was driving to Clones at around 6.30pm on that Friday evening.
He said that as he was attempting to get out onto the main Dublin-Derry Road, a vehicle similar to the one used in the bombing turned into the road on which he was trying to exit.
The man said that this vehicle and another one had then pulled into a side road.
He said that what he had seen ‘seemed suspicious’.