2008-07-30 18:59:08 -

DUBLIN, Ireland (AP) - Ireland's Supreme Court rejected an attempt Wednesday by the founder of an Irish Republican Army splinter gang to overturn his 2001 conviction for «directing terrorism.
The five-judge court unanimously upheld a 2003 appellate court ruling calling Michael McKevitt's conviction and 20-year sentence fair and legally sound.
McKevitt founded the breakaway Real IRA

faction in 1997, the year the outlawed IRA ended its 27-year campaign to overthrow the British territory of Northern Ireland. McKevitt's splinter group was responsible for a 1998 car bombing of the town of Omagh that killed 29 people, the deadliest bombing of the conflict.
He was convicted of «directing terrorism» _ an unprecedented charge in Ireland _ because of testimony from David Rupert, an American spy recruited by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Rupert, a New York-born trucker with a reputation as a smuggler, had posed as potential supplier of weapons and cash following the Omagh attack _ and told his handlers in the FBI and British MI6 spy agency about his contacts with McKevitt.
McKevitt's legal team in 2001 spent two weeks questioning Rupert on the witness stand about his history of tax evasion, bad debts and alleged criminal activity in a bid to portray him as willing to lie for spy money. But Ireland's Special Criminal Court, which hears terrorism-related cases without a jury, accepted Rupert as truthful.
Rupert since has disappeared into an FBI witness-protection program, and McKevitt's lawyers have pursued appeals seeking to find errors in the Special Criminal Court ruling.

But Supreme Court Justice Hugh Geoghegan, who delivered Wednesday's judgment, said the 2001 trial court had «gone out of its way to adopt fair procedures.
Geoghegan said it was unreasonable to expect the trial judges to trawl through every potential question about Rupert's credibility when they had concluded there was no reasonable reason to doubt his testimony. He said the appeal must fail simply because the Special Criminal Court's three judges believed Rupert.
«The fact that Mr. Rupert may or may not have had a shady background, depending on your point of view, and the fact that as a paid agent he might be suspect as a witness, at any rate are neither here nor there, as far as an appellate court is concerned,» Geoghegan said.
McKevitt is one of five defendants in a civil lawsuit being pursued by survivors of the Omagh attack against leading members of the Real IRA. They are seeking 10 million pounds (¤13 million, US$20 million) in damages. It is the first time in Northern Ireland history that victims of terror have sued members of a paramilitary group.