Omagh 'carnage was horrendous'

A police officer giving evidence to the Omagh bombing civil action has said it made the aftermath of another NI atrocity "pale into insignificance".

Sergeant Wesley McCracken described seeing bodies without limbs, some without clothes strewn across a tremendous flood of water.

He said it was "horrendous carnage", many times worse than the Droppin' Well bombing, which he also attended.

Two other police officers gave evidence on the second day of the civil action.

Giving her evidence, Constable Louise Stewart, who broke down, said what she saw that day was so horrific that words could never describe it.

In his cross-examination, Brett Lockhart QC questioned the officers about the time they had received the bomb warning and the discrepancies about its exact location.

The five accused Michael McKevitt - Seamus Daly, Liam Campbell, Colm Murphy and Seamus McKenna - were not in court and will not be providing evidence. They all deny involvement in the bombing.

The men are being sued by relatives of some of the victims of the August 1998 atrocity.

Seventeen people, 11 of them soldiers, were killed by an INLA bomb at the Droppin' Well pub, Ballykelly, County Londonderry, on 6 December 1982.