The bigger Bloody Sunday cover-up

Posted by admin on October 16, 2015

Relatives of those killed in the infamous Bloody Sunday massacre have
denounced a police ‘investigation’ into the murders after it emerged
that 55 British soldiers present that day are refusing to be questioned.

The massacre of civil rights protestors has always had the appearance of
a deliberate colonial strategy to suppress nationalist oppression to
British rule.

Within a period of 30 minutes on January 30, 1972, the British Parachute
Regiment had shot 13 dead and injured almost two dozen. A fourteenth
victim later died of his injuries.

After the massacre, the British military claimed they had been attacked
first and accused the protesters of being ‘terrorists’ and members of
the IRA. This was always rejected as a lie and is now officially
discredited.

But Kate Nash, whose 19-year-old brother William was among those shot
dead when the paratroopers opened fired on January 30, 1972, has said
the British government and PSNI police are engaged in a larger cover-up.

She believes the soldiers were told to fire upon unarmed demonstrators,
rather than the shooting being the result of troops disobeying orders as
the Saville Inquiry claimed in 2010.

No action was taken in response to that inquiry by the PSNI or judicial
authorities for two years, a source of much anger for relatives. In July
2012 a murder investigation was finally launched following intense
public pressure.

Ciaran Shiels from Madden and Finucane solicitors, a lawyer representing
the families, said that the current investigation has been an uphill
battle from the beginning.

“It is important to bear in mind that after the Saville inquiry reported
in 2010, it wasn’t a matter that the PSNI of its own volition took to
investigate — even though Saville had said that these people had been
shot without justification,” he said.

“We had to write both to the Chief Constable and the Public Prosecution
Service saying there is prima facie evidence here of attempted murder on
a grand scale and what are the PSNI going to do about it?”

NO ARRESTS, NO INTERVIEWS

No arrests have been made, and families were told that the military
suspects — the soldiers identified in the Saville report as having
fired the fatal shots — have yet to be interviewed.

In the latest information to emerge, the PSNI’s senior investigative
officer Detective Chief Inspector (DCI) Ian Harrison said 34 military
witnesses had been recorded but a further 55 had “declined to engage
with the team.”

For Kate Nash and the other families of the dead, it has felt like
another bitter blow in their long campaign for justice. She criticised
the PSNI, saying the stalling of the police investigations was
“soul-destroyingly frustrating.”

“The police told us that they couldn’t compel them to come forward, but
that is absolute nonsense — because these 55 witnesses to massacre
should be fully aware there is another crime called withholding
evidence, and we know that very well. They could do the right thing now,
but they don’t. In some of the cases, they have the bullet, they have
the gun that leads to the solder and the police agreed this is solid
evidence, so why haven’t they arrested him?”

Shiels, the solicitor, said it didn’t appear to have occurred to the
police that they could and should compel the British Army members to
co-operate, and that they could be charged and jailed for failing to do
so.

“In respect of murder, when one withholds information, it can be
punishable by up to ten years imprisonment,” he said. “It is an
arrestable offence, and the position of the families would be that
soldiers who are suspected of withholding relevant information should be
warned that they are themselves at risk of arrest and prosecution. So it
came as an issue of very serious and immediate concern to the families
that there seemed to be an attitude of the PSNI that is someone doesn’t
want to co-operate with us there is nothing we can do about it. ”

He also said stressed that a great number of civilian witnesses that day
would have been fleeing for their lives or hiding from the barrage of
bullets the soldiers were firing, while those soldiers not firing at the
crowd would have had a privileged and safe view of events.

INQUIRY STOPPED SHORT

Kate Nash believes that the findings of the Saville inquiry, as scathing
as they were, did not reveal the full truth of the events of the day,
and there are political reasons why the police are not investigating the
murders fully. The British government, she says, is afraid of what the
soldiers might say if they were in court.

“It is a terrible blow to us all. They could arrest soldiers right now
and the fact is they are not. The government doesn’t want to take
soldiers to court, and I’ll tell you why — because it went further than
those soldiers,” she said.

“[Saville] concluded that one officer and nine soldiers were responsible
for what happened — [the report] said the officer had disobeyed orders
but the same officer was actually given an OBE at the end of 1972 and
those soldiers were all given medals of honour. If they were given medals
then obviously they had done good work. They were ordered in there, we
know that.”

She recounted how her brother’s dying body was abused by the soldiers.

“When William was shot, my father ran out under a hail of bullets try
and help him, and he was shot and injured in his arm and in his side,”
Nash said. “William’s body was dragged out of his arms by the army and
he was taken into the back of a [military] van. My father never really
got over the way they dragged his body away from him like that.”

Her mother had been in hospital and did not attend the march, and was
only well enough to be told about the death on the day of William’s
funeral.

“She was well sedated when my father and the local priest told her, and
she didn’t react — there was just silence. It was when she got home a
few days later she walked through the front door, she just started
screaming his name, and that screaming lasted for a long time. A very
long time.”