A barrister representing relatives of the dead of Bloody Sunday has launched a scathing attack on the reliability of evidence given to Lord Saville's tribunal by British soldiers who opened fire in Derry in January 1972, killing 13 civilians.
As the inquiry began a new session at the city's Guildhall, Arthur Harvey QC insisted the families had been certain for 30 years that their loved ones were targeted deliberately.
He said: "Those questions can only be answered by those who shot them, by those who were responsible for commanding those that shot them, and those who were responsible for designing the plan and implementing it during the course in which they were shot.
"Having posed questions, and those questions to paraphrase General Jackson, required individual soldiers and officers to look inside themselves for the courage to tell the truth.
"Regrettably that has not occurred."
Mr Harvey argued the alleged resistance from Paratroopers who opened fire on civil rights marchers on Bloody Sunday would stop the real facts from emerging.
He said the original, controversial Widgery inquiry into the killings had now been overturned.
"The truth has come out to a substantial degree," the lawyer said.
"Not with a degree of certainty that many of the families would have wished. But one certainty has been established.
"Lord Widgery held that there was strong suspicion that a number of persons at the barricade were either armed or close to armed people.
"That evidence is now based on discredited forensic information.
"That alone makes this inquiry worthwhile, because it lifts the shadow for those families of accusations that still exists in certain sections of this community that these innocent victims brought about their own deaths."
Over the next fortnight, legal teams for both the families and the Army will be questioned on written submissions given to the inquiry as it reaches its conclusion.
Lord Saville and his colleagues will seek more detail on opposing arguments that the victims were murdered and that troops used reasonable force.
Counsel to the inquiry, Christopher Clarke QC, stressed at the opening that the hearing did not have the powers of a criminal court.
Although it could not delve too far into uncertainties over disputed opinions, Mr Clarke argued the inquiry should be allowed to refer to possibilities where appropriate.
He said: "The submissions appear to suggest that it would not be open to the tribunal to report to the Secretary of State that although it could not be sure what had happened in respect of any of the victims of Bloody Sunday, it thought the probabilities were that one or more victims were unlawfully killed by one or more specified soldiers.
"That cannot, I venture to suggest, be right.
"The tribunal may think that Parliament, the Secretary of State and the families, not to mention the taxpayer, would justifiably gasp if the tribunal might be compelled to say in the case of any victim: 'We cannot be sure who murdered him, we think it highly probable that it was someone whom we can identify, but by law or by our own self-denying ordinance we cannot tell you who that is."