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From the ERRI Watch Center

OMAGH, NORTHERN IRELAND (EmergencyNet News) - The death toll from Saturday's massive car bomb in the town of Omagh, which is located about 50 miles west of Belfast, rose to 28 during the night. At least 220 other people were wounded by the blast, many seriously. The victims included at least 15 women out shopping and their children. Some were literally torn to pieces by the blast. Others were horribly maimed.

Police said the bomb blast's impact was increased by a misleading telephone warning, which directed evacuees towards the car where the explosives were planted. According to police, the caller told them a bomb had been left in a car near the town's courthouse. They moved people away from the court- house -- right into the area where the bomb actually exploded.

No group has yet claimed responsibility, but politicians have mostly blamed dissident republican groups opposed to a peace agreement signed last April which aims to end 30 years of Catholic-Protestant strife in the British province.

Television reports said Protestant paramilitaries planned to meet in secret on Sunday to decide whether to break off their ceasefire and seek revenge against Catholics for the bombing.

Amateur video footage shot just after the blast and aired on television showed hundreds of people, many of them streaming with blood, staggering through the wrecked street where the bomb went off.

An 18-month-old baby was among men, women -- one of them pregnant -- and children from both the Protestant and Catholic communities who died in the devastation wreaked by a 500 pound car bomb. Many were trapped as buildings collapsed at one end of Market Street, close to the junction of the Dublin Road, 40 minutes after the terrorists gave an inaccurate location for the bomb.

Northern Irish police said on Sunday they had set up a special task force to hunt down and find those responsible for the devastating car bomb. Royal Ulster Constabulary chief Ronnie Flanagan said, "No stone will be left unturned until we bring these people to justice."

Flanagan said the task force would be headed by one of his deputies. It would concentrate its investigations on a dissident republican guerrilla group known as the "Real" IRA which opposes efforts to bring peace to the troubled province.

The "Real" IRA has emerged as the most dangerous of the dissident republican groups opposed to the Good Friday settlement. The group is believed to have been responsible for a series of recent attacks, including a 500 pound car bomb which devastated the market town of Banbridge earlier this month.

In May, following a mortar attack on a police station, it declared that it appointed an "army executive" and that a "war machine is once again being directed at the British Cabinet." The group is led by the man who resigned as the IRA's quartermaster-general last October after he broke with Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness over Sinn Fein's support for the peace process.

The break echoed the split between the Provisionals and the Official IRA in the 1970s. The man, who lives in Dundalk in the Irish Republic, is thought to have taken with him a number of the IRA's "engineering department" - its bombmakers - as well as details of the IRA's arms dumps.

Reports have put its membership - which is based largely in the Republic - at 50-70 dissidents, although there has been speculation that disaffection with the April agreement by hardline republicans has led to a swelling of its ranks. The Irish police appeared to have been enjoying some success against the group, seizing bomb-making equipment and intercepting a number of bombing mission against the North.

(C)Copyright, EmergencyNet NEWS Service, 1998. All Rights Reserved. Further redistribution without permission is prohibited by law.

The ERRI DAILY INTELLIGENCE REPORT is a subscription publication of the EmergencyNet NEWS Service, which is a part of the Chicago-based Emergency Response and Research Institute. This publication specializes in Security/Terrorism/Intelligence/Military and National Security issues.

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