RELATIVES of Bloody Sunday victims have begun a new legal battle to overturn the official British version of what happened and to have the truth unearthed by an independent inquiry.
Yesterday, on the 25th anniversary of the killings, legal representatives of the relatives announced in Derry that papers are being lodged in the Northern Ireland High Court to begin an application for a judicial review aimed at having the Widgery findings quashed.
At the launch of a new body, the Bloody Sunday Trust, whose primary aim is to establish what happened, the retired bishop of Derry, Dr Edward Daly, said the tribunal report of the British Lord Chief Justice, Lord Widgery, had "found that the innocent were guilty and the guilty were innocent".
Dr Daly said: "A great wrong was done. A great injustice was perpetrated. Innocent people were murdered. This wrong was compounded by the manner in which, false allegations were made against the dead."
Dr Daly commented that, since Bloody Sunday, a deeper realisation had emerged that an atrocity perpetrated on one pectin of the community was an atrocity perpetrated on the whole community.
In subsequent atrocities, church leaders in particular had been united in their genuine sympathy and concern for victims and bereaved, irrespective of their political or religious affiliation.
However, with a number of notable and praiseworthy exceptions, "few people in leadership positions within the unionist community or in the Protestant churches expressed any public sympathy or private concern for victims in the aftermath of Bloody, Sunday.
"When everyone perceives an atrocity perpetrated on one section of the community as an atrocity perpetrated on the whole community, then we will be making progress in being truly Christian and truly human," he said.
The Bloody Sunday Trust yesterday published a report by Dr Dermot Walsh, Professor of Law at the University of Limerick, in which he outlines discrepancies between statements given to military police by soldiers a few hours after the Derry killings, and the testimony of the same soldiers at the Widgery Tribunal.
Prof Walsh's detailed legal analysis of the tribunal and its findings is being used - with other evidence uncovered recently - to initiate a judicial review of the tribunal.
Meanwhile, archive film rebroadcast by UTV yesterday showed Maj Gen Robert Ford, the then Commander of Land Forces in Northern Ireland, admitting on the day after the killings that soldiers other than the Parachute Regiment had been firing.