A west Belfast man, who fought for 20 years to clear his name, has slammed the Public Prosecution Service after his conviction for possessing explosives was overturned on Tuesday.
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Following an unprecedented third appeal, senior judges ruled that the guilty verdict against Christy Walsh was unsafe.
The Court of Appeal declared unease about the safety of the conviction due to issues around the lack of fingerprint evidence and a soldier's statement.
After the hearing, Mr Walsh, 46, severely criticised the Public Prosecution Service for obstructing his case.
"I think they still have a lot of information that I and my lawyers don't know about and it's questionable if we will ever know about it", he told UTV.
"They blocked me every step of the way in trying to get material. I have now got possession of serious and incriminating material on the PPS. It's in the hands of my lawyers. I gathered it at the end of my appeal last Tuesday and that is going to be explored and I think the PPS will be in a lot of hot water when things are revealed."
Mr Walsh served a 14-year prison sentence for a coffee-jar bomb he was said to have when stopped by soldiers in 1991.
His trial heard he took a glass jar containing semtex from his pocket, which he was told to place on a low wall during his arrest at Lenadoon, west Belfast.
Walsh, a painter and decorator now based in Jordanstown, has campaigned ever since to try to prove there was a miscarriage of justice, continuing his legal battle despite losing two earlier legal challenges.
Fingerprints
His lawyers advanced a number of grounds on which they claimed the conviction should be quashed. These included the non-disclosure of information about a top IRA man arrested in the area on the same day as him.
It was argued this senior, unidentified, paramilitary could have been responsible for the device.
Testimony given by military witnesses was also criticised as inconsistent and unreliable, while evidence at trial on the lack of fingerprints in the case was ridiculed as "complete nonsense".
Walsh's legal team called their own independent expert as part of their appeal.
Allan Bayle, a forensic scene examiner with the Metropolitan Police for more than 20 years, told the hearing it would be expected to find prints if someone had handled a device.
Ruling on the appeal, Lord Chief Justice Sir Declan Morgan, sitting with Lord Justice Girvan and Mr Justice McCloskey, held that evidence on the fingerprints appeared to have misled the original court, although not deliberately.
Sir Declan said: "The fresh evidence indicated a strong likelihood that if the coffee jar had been handled by the appellant as alleged a fingerprint would have been detectable immediately thereafter.
"It was also clear, however, that the forensic bagging techniques used at that time raised the possibility that any such fingerprint would have been lost in transfer."
Sir Declan added fresh evidence about the prints might have impacted on this view, while a second statement from one of the soldiers may have affected the evaluation of his reliability.
"For those reasons we are left with a significant sense of unease about the safety of this verdict," the judge said.
Drawing comparisons with other high-profile cases, Mr Walsh said:
"Like the Thomas Devlin family, like the Robert Hamill family, the prosecution have obstructed and prevented me from getting justice before now.
"It is generally accepted that I won this case a long time ago. This morning was just a formality in getting it officially sanctioned."
Mr Walsh's lawyer, Kevin Winters, insisted 20 years was an unacceptably long time to wait for justice.
"Prosecuting authorities missed a number of chances many years ago to remedy what has long since amounted to a serious miscarriage of justice and to that end Mr Walsh will now be seeking compensation for the 14 years he spent in jail for a crime he did not commit," he said.
In a statement, the PPS said Mr Walsh's comments were an example of a misunderstanding of the proper role of the prosecution within the criminal justice system.
It said the prosecution had acted with complete propriety at all times in relation to the case.
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