THE sobbing grew louder as the day wore on in Omagh yesterday and the impact of the bomb was slowly absorbed by hundreds of people gathering in the town's leisure centre in a desperate quest for information.

The men, women and children huddled in family groups, hugging and passing paper tissues as people broke down, unable to cope with losing a loved one who went out shopping on a Saturday afternoon and failed to return.

The emergency services had converted the leisure complex into an information centre to give what details there were about the injured, missing and dead.

Panicked relatives flooded in from early Saturday evening after their searches of bedrooms, friends' houses and hospitals failed to yield any trace of a missing son or daughter, husband or wife.

Police and social workers directed them to notice-boards in the canteen. The black marker on yellow paper listed who was alive and in which hospital. The luckier ones hugged, kissed and made a hasty trip to one of the six hospitals dealing with the injured.

For others, the yellow notices marked only the beginning of a long and painful wait. They returned again and again to the top of the sheets to ensure they had not missed the name. When they still failed to find it, they persuaded themselves that the authorities had failed to locate or identify their relatives.

Around midnight, a man stood at the side of the canteen with a megaphone, announcing that he had a new list of people hospitalised. Silence descended as he read out about 20 names.

Those still in the dark trawled over possible explanations and latched on to the incredible stories of people who had survived the blast. Social workers, priests and ministers moved between the groups that grew smaller and paler as night turned into early morning.

People were given snacks, coffee and soft drinks by the canteen staff, and taxis laid on a free service to ferry people to and from their homes. In a back room, police interviewed relatives about distinguishing body marks. When that failed to yield a definitive answer, the police asked for photographs and descriptions of jewellery.

By 2am the crowd was down to 100. Sons sent parents home to sleep and assumed watch duty. For the Rev Eugene Hassan, the Roman Catholic hospital chaplain, the scene was heartbreaking. He said: "The really awful thing is that everybody waiting here now at this time of the morning is unlikely to find somebody missing or injured. They're probably going to discover that they are dead. How do you prepare somebody for that?"

It proved an impossible task. The family of Brenda Logue, a 17-year-old Roman Catholic, sat up all night. She had gone shopping with her mother and grandmother.

They were in S. D. Kells, the main suppliers of school uniforms in Omagh, when she heard a commotion outside. Her mother, Mary, saw her leave the shop, heard the bomb explode and had not seen her daughter since. Her uncle Padraig still retained hope of finding her at 2am. "Part of me is expecting the worst but most of me is optimistic. Someone you love like that doesn't just vanish," he said.