LONDON - An independent inquiry into whether the deaths of 29 people in Omagh in 1998, the worst attack in decades of violence in Northern Ireland, could have been prevented held its first hearing on Tuesday.

The Omagh bombing on Aug. 15, 1998 saw Irish nationalist militants opposed to the Good Friday peace deal signed earlier that year detonate a car bomb on a busy shopping street in the Northern Irish town.

Twenty-nine people including a woman pregnant with twins were killed and more than 200 people wounded.

Britain's High Court ruled in 2021 that there were plausible arguments that the bombing by the Real IRA militant group could have been prevented.

"The trauma caused has been enduring and continues to have a most powerful impact," the inquiry's chairman Alan Turnbull said in his opening statement, pledging the inquiry would undertake its task "rigorously and fearlessly".

"It will not allow itself to be deflected from its purpose by the difficulties which may lie in its way on account of the passage time or the volume and complexity of materials."

Tuesday's session was procedural, with no witnesses due to be called or evidence heard until early next year.

The inquiry will examine the handling of intelligence, use of mobile phone analysis, whether there was advance knowledge of the attack and whether disruption operations could have been mounted.

No one has ever been convicted for the killings. However, a number of men were found liable in civil proceedings.

Charges against a 45-year-old-man from the Irish Republic were withdrawn in 2016. In 2007 the only other man charged with the 29 murders, South Armagh electrician Sean Hoey, then 38, was acquitted after a lengthy non-jury trial.

The attack came shortly after the Good Friday peace accord, which largely ended more than three decades of violence between Irish nationalist militants seeking union with the rest of Ireland, the British army and pro-British militants who sought to keep the region part of the United Kingdom.

  - Reuters