Bloody Sunday victims 'cleared of carrying arms'

Bloody Sunday victims have finally been cleared of false findings that they were armed when soldiers opened fire, a barrister said today.

Arthur Harvey QC also launched a withering attack on military chiefs and the Westminster government he blamed letting out of control troops on the streets of Derry in January 1972 when 13 civil rights marchers were shot dead.

As Lord Saville’s sprawling tribunal began a new session at the city’s Guildhall, he accused the British army of giving false evidence.

Mr Harvey, representing relatives of the dead, insisted the families had been convinced for three decades their loved ones were targeted deliberately.

“Having posed questions, those questions, to paraphrase General Jackson, required individual soldiers and officers to look inside themselves for the courage to tell the truth.

“Regrettably that has not occurred.”

But alleged resistance from Paratroopers who opened fire on Bloody Sunday would not stop the real facts from emerging, the barrister pledged.

He claimed Lord Widgery’s original, controversial inquiry into the killings that haunted the victims’ families has now been overturned.

“The truth has come out to a substantial degree,” the lawyer said.

“Not with a degree of certainty that many of the families would have wished. But one certainty has been established.

“Lord Widgery held that there was strong suspicion that a number of persons at the barricade were either armed or close to armed people.

“That evidence is now based on discredited forensic information.

“That alone makes this inquiry worthwhile, because it lifts the shadow for those families of accusations that still exists in certain sections of this community that these innocent victims brought about their own deaths.”

Instead, he went on the offensive against the authorities he blamed for a lack of clarity and accountability.

“The government of Westminster sent the troops to Northern Ireland without any clear definition as to their constitutional or legal standing, to whom they would be responsible and in what circumstances,” Mr Harvey claimed.

“The vacuum created by the lack of clarity, by the sovereign parliament meant that the army were here without any clear political definition and control.

“That meant the army itself had a degree of autonomy operating against a political background and security that it would not have enjoyed in any other part of the world.

“There was no electoral deficit in ignoring the problems of Northern Ireland and there was no electoral benefit in attending to those problems.

“Northern Ireland simply did not feature sufficiently highly on a government agenda to attend to the problems of the day-to-day operations of the army in Northern Ireland.”

Over the next fortnight legal teams for both the families and the British army will be questioned on written submissions given to the inquiry as it reaches its conclusion.

Lord Saville and his colleagues will seek more detail on opposing arguments that the victims were murdered and that troops used reasonable force.

Counsel to the inquiry, Christopher Clarke QC stressed at the opening that the hearing did not have the powers of a criminal court.

Although it could not delve too far into uncertainties over disputed opinions, Mr Clarke argued the inquiry should be allowed to refer to possibilities where appropriate.

He said: “The submissions appear to suggest that it would not be open to the tribunal to report to the Secretary of State that although it could not be sure what had happened in respect of any of the victims of Bloody Sunday, it thought the probabilities were that one or more victims were unlawfully killed by one or more specified soldiers.

“That cannot, I venture to suggest, be right.

“The tribunal may think that Parliament, the Secretary of State and the families, not to mention the taxpayer, would justifiably gasp if the tribunal might be compelled to say in the case of any victim: ’We cannot be sure who murdered him, we think it highly probable that it was someone whom we can identify, but by law or by our own self-denying ordinance we cannot tell you who that is.”