At the time of this writing, the real bombers still have not been officially identified. Only they know why they parked the bomb car in the wrong place on Lower Market Street. And only they know why they allowed inaccurate warnings to be passed on to the media and the Royal Ulster Constabulary, thus creating the circumstances for a catastrophic loss of innocent life. Surely the police and intelligence services of Ireland and the United Kingdom know their names. Yet seventeen years after the bombing, no one has been convicted for the largest mass murder in British or Irish history. In June 2009 a judge in Northern Ireland ordered four men—Michael McKevitt, Liam Campbell, Colm Murphy, and Seamus Daly—to pay one and a half million pounds to the families of the Omagh victims. To date, no money has changed hands. In April 2014 Seamus Daly was arrested at a shopping center in South Armagh, where he was living openly, and charged with twenty-nine counts of murder. If past cases are any guide, the chances of a successful prosecution are remote. In 2002 Ireland’s Special Criminal Court convicted Colm Murphy of conspiracy in the bombing, only to see its verdict overturned on appeal. Murphy’s nephew faced trial in Northern Ireland in 2006 but was acquitted.

In the aftermath of the Good Friday Agreement, British intelligence learned that highly skilled IRA bomb makers were selling their expertise on the open market. Among the countries where former IRA terrorists plied their deadly trade was the Islamic Republic of Iran. Historian Gordon Thomas, in his history of MI6 entitled Secret Wars, wrote that a delegation of IRA terrorists traveled secretly to Tehran in 2006 to help Iran build an antitank weapon for its Lebanese client Hezbollah—a weapon that could create a fireball capable of traveling a thousand feet per second. Hezbollah used the weapon against Israeli tanks and armored vehicles, but British soldiers serving in Iraq also found themselves the targets of IRA-developed technology. In 2005 eight British soldiers were killed in Basra by a sophisticated roadside bomb that was identical to devices used by the IRA in South Armagh. Counterterrorism experts speculated that the blueprints for the weapon reached Iraq as a result of the IRA’s long association with the PLO. Both organizations enjoyed the patronage of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi and trained at his infamous desert camps, where they shared knowledge and resources. Libya did indeed supply virtually all of the Semtex used by the IRA during the war for Northern Ireland.