The SDLP has complained that PSNI Chief Constable Sir Hugh Orde failed to answer fully questions put to him at yesterday's meeting of the North's Policing Board about the Omagh bombing.
Sir Hugh said that MI5 did not withhold intelligence that could have advanced the police inquiry into the Real IRA bombing of August 1998 that claimed the lives of 29 people, including a woman pregnant with twin girls.
But Sir Hugh did not contradict a comment by Omagh families' representative Michael Gallagher last week that MI5 held back important information from the RUC's Special Branch four months before the bombing.
The April 1998 bomb attack was disrupted by the Garda as a result of intelligence provided by David Rupert, the FBI agent whose evidence at the Special Criminal Court in Dublin in 2003 helped to jail Real IRA leader Michael McKevitt for 20 years, senior sources said.
Sir Hugh told the Policing Board yesterday that the Real IRA unit responsible for the Omagh bombing was different from the unit whose planned April bomb attack in 1998 was disrupted.
When SDLP board member Alex Attwood attempted to elicit whether MI5 had withheld intelligence about the disrupted April attack from the RUC, Sir Hugh replied, "It is the view of the senior investigating officer [Det Chief Supt Norman Baxter] that the security service did not withhold intelligence that was relevant or would have progressed the criminal Omagh inquiry."
This answer, however, did not address the claim that the then RUC was deprived of information about the planned April attack. Mr Attwood said the question remained open.
