The long-awaited report into the Bloody Sunday massacre will conclude that a number of the fatal shootings of civilians by British soldiers were unlawful killings, the Guardian has learned. Lord Saville's twelve-year inquiry into the deaths, the longest public inquiry in British legal history, will conclude with a report published next Tuesday, putting severe pressure on the Public Prosecution Service in Northern Ireland to prosecute soldiers.
Lord Trimble, the former leader of the Ulster Unionists and one of the architects of the Good Friday agreement, revealed to the Guardian that when Tony Blair agreed to the inquiry in 1998, he warned the then prime minister that any conclusion that departed 'one millimetre' from the earlier 1972 Widgery report into the killings would lead to 'soldiers in the dock'. One unionist MP who did not wish to be named described the conclusion of unlawful killings as a 'hand-grenade with the pin pulled out that is about to be tossed into the lap of the PPS' in Northern Ireland.
Thirteen unarmed civilians, all of them male, were shot dead at a civil rights march in the Bogside area of Derry in January 1972. A 14th man died of his wounds several months later."
The Guardian
