" Teebane victims wait for Justice"

The relatives of eight Protestant workmen murdered at Teebane are still pleading for justice - 15 years to the day from the IRA massacre.

On January 17.1992 . a PIRA bomb killed seven and fatally injured an eighth in a minibus on the main Omagh to Cookstown Road.

The men were working for Ballymena company Karl Construction and were returning from a day's work at Lisanelly Army base.

The East Tyrone PIRA Brigade admitted responsibility for the device, which they detonated by command wire at 5.30pm. Six other workers were left badly injured.

One survivor, David Neely, said: "I looked around and all I could see was fire... I thought I had been electrocuted because of the pain... there were people lying on the ground... I couldn't tell you whether there were two, three or five

Secretary of State Peter Brooke later appeared on RTE's Late Late Show where he expressed "profound and sincere sympathy" but incensed unionists by afterwards giving a rendition of My Darling Clementine, for which he offered his resignation.

There was widespread condemnation of the bombing from both sides of the community and border, but 15 years later to the day still nobody has been held accountable.

Trevor Clarke's brother-in-law, Nigel McKee, 22, was one of those killed and in his opinion nobody has ever been held accountable for one reason: "Appeasement!"

He says there was virtually no contact between the families and the police for ]0 years after the bomb: "When we started applying pressure five years ago we began to get action. But even with senior police officers and their researchers meeting us, they were still not fit to give us answers and took months to come back.

"How can two oil drums be dug into the side of a busy main road and nobody notice? It appears that only paramilitaries and republicans get proper investigations nowadays, the rest of us are treated with contempt.

"The IRA men involved gave an interview to a magazine afterwards where they were glorifying what they had done and who they represented,"

He thinks it is equally plausible that an inform­ant in the IRA brigade was being protected or that the investigation was incompetent, but he doubts that resources were a problem, as there were so many more officers in those days.

The Rev William McCrea has been helping the families press for action, but he too has serious concerns about the investigation: "I certainly feel this atrocity was not treated with the seriousness it deserved," he said.

"Even after over a dozen meetings with police and Government, we still don't know why nobody has been brought to justice.

"We have raised many queries, for example how many people have been questioned? And yet the families don't feel any of their basic issues have been dealt with."

While relatives are in possession of a number of names of those allegedly responsible, he said the police are saying they do not have enough evidence to charge anyone. Now the families are looking to the PSNI Historical Enquiries Team (HET) for hope, but are unsure what to expect.

DUP MP Jeffrey Donaldson has been working closely with the HET and advised that its work was really just getting under way, "families need truth and justice but often the long passage of time is a constraint," he said

"I don't doubt every effort will be made but even if there are convictions, people are unlikely to serve more than two years because of the Good Friday Agreement,"