Inquiry Finds 1972 Killings In Northern Ireland Unjust

A 12-year investigation into the 1972 "Bloody Sunday" massacre found British troops committed "unjustified and unjustifiable" killings of Catholic demonstrators who were wrongly described as Irish Republican Army bombers and gunmen.

More than 1,000 residents of Londonderry, Northern Ireland, applauded, hugged and cried outside city hall Tuesday as the long-awaited verdict was announced live on a huge television screen. They had campaigned for 38 years for the victims to have their good names restored and the guilt of the soldiers proved beyond doubt.

"Unjustified and unjustifiable. Those are the words we've been waiting to hear since January the 30th of 1972," Tony Doherty, the son of one Bloody Sunday victim, told the crowd to cheers. He was one of dozens of relatives who took turns declaring the innocence of lost loved ones to the crowd as the TV screen displayed black-and-white portraits of each of the 13 dead and 15 wounded.

"The victims of Bloody Sunday have been vindicated, and the soldiers of the Parachute Regiment have been disgraced. Their medals of honor have to be removed!" Doherty declared to more cheers.

In Parliament, Prime Minister David Cameron apologized on behalf of Britain. He said the protesters killed by British troops were innocent civil rights demonstrators and that the soldiers who took part in the massacre lied when they said they were attacked by IRA gunman.

"There is no doubt. There is nothing equivocal. There are no ambiguities. What happened on Bloody Sunday was both unjustified and unjustifiable. It was wrong," he said.

Cameron summarized the findings of English Judge Lord Saville: The soldiers never should have been ordered to confront the protesters; they fired the first shots and targeted unarmed people who were clearly fleeing or aiding the helpless wounded. None of those killed or wounded that day in Londonderry had posed a threat to the soldiers, Saville concluded.

The 5,000-page Saville report was first ordered by Tony Blair as part of his push for peace in Northern Ireland in the late 1990s.

The inquiry is the longest in British history. More than 900 witnesses were called over 400 days of testimony. It cost around $300 million. Cameron said Britain would never attempt anything like it again.

But the British, Irish and U.S. governments welcomed the findings as priceless to heal one of the gaping wounds left from Northern Ireland's four-decade conflict that left 3,700 dead. Bloody Sunday fueled a rise in support for the IRA, which didn't cease fire until 1997 after killing nearly 1,800 people.

"It is our hope that the scale of the inquiry, the quantity of material available, and its findings will contribute to greater understanding and reconciliation of what happened on that tragic day," U.S. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said in Washington.

Saville said Bloody Sunday represented a watershed event in the conflict, driving 1972 to be the conflict's deadliest year with more than 470 dead.

"What happened on Bloody Sunday strengthened the Provisional IRA, increased [Irish] nationalist resentment and hostility toward the army, and exacerbated the violent conflict of the years that followed. Bloody Sunday was a tragedy for the bereaved and the wounded, and a catastrophe for the people of Northern Ireland," Saville said.

The judge took evidence from former British government officials, the soldiers who opened fire that day, and IRA members involved in the protest. He ruled that a few IRA men did come armed to the demonstration, but the soldiers fired the shots that started the one-sided bloodbath.

Saville gave the paratroopers broad protections from criminal charges as well as anonymity in the witness box, citing the risk that IRA dissidents might target them in retaliation. But some legal experts said wiggle room remains for prosecutions and, more likely, civil lawsuits against retired soldiers now in their 60s and 70s, particularly because some ex-soldiers were found to have told lies to Saville.

Saville's findings declared that several soldiers who opened fire concocted cover stories to justify their shooting of unarmed people in the back. But he cautioned that the inquiry's evidence could not be used "to incriminate that witness in any later criminal proceedings."

"This does not rule out the possibility of future criminal proceedings against an individual, but only means that their own evidence to the Bloody Sunday Inquiry cannot be used against them," Saville wrote.

The original 1972 investigation by another English judge, Lord Widgery, took barely two months to produce a 39-page report that chided soldiers for gunfire that "bordered on the reckless." But Widgery accepted soldiers' claims that they had been responding to IRA attacks, and said he suspected -- despite any solid forensic or witness evidence beyond the soldiers' claims -- that some of those killed "had been firing weapons or handling bombs in the course of the afternoon."

Several IRA witnesses -- including former IRA commander Martin McGuinness, now the senior Catholic in the power-sharing government -- had testified to Saville that their members were unarmed and did not shoot at troops.

The report found, however, that McGuinness was present and armed with a machine gun that day, but that he did not use the weapon.