Bloody Sunday massacre: British ex-soldier arrested on suspicion of murder

March 14, 2019, 7:42 AM EDT / Updated March 14, 2019, 8:41 AM EDT
By Associated Press

DUBLIN — Detectives investigating the biggest mass killing committed by British troops in Northern Ireland, the Bloody Sunday massacre in 1972, have arrested on suspicion of murder one of the soldiers who opened fire that day — the first detention of its kind following decades of demands for justice.

A special police unit probing killings from the Northern Ireland conflict, the Legacy Investigation Branch, said it was interrogating the 66-year-old former member of the Parachute Regiment, the elite force that shot to death 13 Catholic protesters in the Bogside district of Londonderry. Catholic leaders and lawyers representing relatives of the dead welcomed the arrest and said they expected more retired soldiers to be arrested.

The detained man was identified as a former soldier who had testified, with his identity concealed, to two fact-finding investigations about his role in shooting at protesters when he was a 23-year-old lance corporal. To the fury of Irish nationalists, the original British probe in 1972 exonerated him and the other soldiers.

But after 12 years, the most expensive fact-finding commission in British history concluded in 2010 that the soldiers had opened fire first and without warning, not in response to attacks from the outlawed Irish Republican Army; all but one of the Bloody Sunday victims were unarmed at the time they were killed; and none posed a threat to the soldiers.

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