UK Prime Minister apologizes for Bloody Sunday

On June 15th British Prime Minister David Cameron apologized for the 1972 killings by British troops of 14 protesters on Northern Ireland's Bloody Sunday after a long-awaited report said those shot were unarmed.

The decades of terrorist attacks and reprisals known as the Troubles began in earnest on Jan. 30, 1972, when British paratroopers fired into a crowd of peace protesters in Londonderry, killing 14, half of them teenage boys. Some victims were shot while they were cowering, crawling away, waving surrender flags or being treated for injuries.

The sectarian conflict (all the victims were Roman Catholic) quickly escalated into what became the world’s longest and bloodiest terrorist crisis. It strengthened the Provisional Irish Republican Army, and led to an increased military presence in Northern Ireland by British troops. Over the next three decades, several entire city centres would be blown up by the IRA and more than 3,000 people killed.

Nationalists, mostly Catholics, wanted to secede and become part of Ireland, while unionists, mostly Protestants, wanted to remain part of the United Kingdom.

Cameron told Parliament the findings of the Saville Report showed that there was no justification whatsoever for the shootings of civilians during the civil rights march.

"What happened should never, ever have happened . . . Some members of our armed forces acted wrongly," Cameron said. "For that, on behalf of the government, and indeed our country, I am deeply sorry," he said.

A huge crowd that had gathered in Londonderry's Guildhall Square, the intended destination of the 1972 march, cheered when they heard Cameron’s apology broadcast on a giant TV screen.

"None of the casualties was posing a threat of causing death or serious injury, or indeed was doing anything else that could on any view justify their shooting," the Saville report said, rejecting the soldiers' assertion that the victims were armed. A 1972 official report into Bloody Sunday is now discredited as a cover-up.

The 5,000-page report was 12 years in the making and the costliest in British legal history. Chaired by Lord Saville, a British judge, the inquiry took evidence from 2,500 people from 1998 to 2004.

Some families may try to have the soldiers prosecuted, which would be problematic after many killers from all sides of the Northern Ireland conflict were freed from prison as part of the 1998 Good Friday peace accord.

(Nov. 21, 1920 is also known as “Bloody Sunday” when, during the Irish War of Independence, a total of 31 people were killed in Dublin in three separate actions – 14 British, 14 Irish civilians and three republican prisoners.) –Various news sources