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The Sunday Times – Return to Bloody Sunday
The authors investigated the shootings for The Sunday Times. They reveal how their findings became pivotal to the inquiry. Peter Pringle and Philip Jacobson

On Tuesday at 8am, a small band of lawyers, among them Britain’s best and brightest, will enter the Guildhall in Londonderry under what the government is calling “exceptional arrangements”. To be allowed in the front door, each lawyer, however well known, must be wearing a government-issued red wrist band and surrender all means of electronic communication, including mobile phones.

For two hours in a “secure area”, the lawyers will remain incommunicado while they are given the first public glimpse of the report of the Saville inquiry into Bloody Sunday — a 5,000- page document, a dozen years in the making, on the tragic events of January 30, 1972, in the Bogside when 13 Catholics were shot dead and another 14 wounded (one fatally) in a fusillade from soldiers of the 1st Battalion, the Parachute Regiment. Security on this incendiary report on an event that shocked the rest of Britain and the world has been so tight that there have been no serious leaks, even though it has been in final form since March and has been scanned by government officials and secret service agents. The Guardian newspaper’s claim last week to know its conclusions was a speculative punt.

At 10am, family members of the dead and wounded, only two per victim and identified for security by yellow wrist bands, will be allowed into the Guildhall through the back door to join the lawyers who represented their relatives in the inquiry.

In an undisclosed location, somewhere in London, former soldiers who fired the shots, and their commanders, will also be given a copy, as will “nominated MPs and peers”. Under the same restrictions, the media will have access only to a 60-page summary, and only for one hour.

Nobody is allowed to say anything in public until 3.30pm when David Cameron, who was five when the killings took place, will make a short statement on the Saville report in the House of Commons. That will be the final act of Britain’s longest-running and most expensive public inquiry, which has cost an astonishing £191m…

The families are hopeful they will leave the Guildhall with the names of their fallen loved ones cleared for all time, but nothing is certain.

“We’ve waited 38 years for the truth to emerge for all the world to see,” said John Kelly, whose brother Michael, 17, was among the first civilians to be shot dead at a makeshift barricade in the heart of the Bogside that became one of the main killing fields.

Emotions are running so high in Derry that the family lawyers fear the slightest hint of criticism of the dead or wounded — any perceptible concession from Saville towards the army version that the dead carried weapons — could trigger an emotional explosion: an uncontrollable relative might storm out of the Guildhall into the arms of the waiting media outside, and blow the report’s cover.

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