A suspected Irish Republican Army dissident faced 15 charges Saturday, including possession of key parts of the car bomb used to kill 29 people in Northern Ireland’s deadliest explosion. The apparent breakthrough in a five-year hunt for those responsible for bombing Omagh came as David Trimble, the Protestant politician central to the survival of Northern Ireland’s peace process, narrowly defeated a hard-line challenge within his divided Ulster Unionist Party. Trimble, who has faced repeated Ulster Unionist revolts because of his support for the Good Friday peace accord of 1998, triumphed in a 443-359 vote of his party’s grassroots council. The victory allowed him to proceed with plans to suspend or expel three senior critics, who oppose plans for reviving a joint Catholic-Protestant government. Trimble, who had led the power-sharing government until its collapse last October, could have been ousted as party leader had he lost the vote. Full Story
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