The Bloody Sunday killings were a result of failures, misjudgments and wholly unacceptable policies made at the highest political and military levels, and were followed by a deliberate coverup, counsel for next-of-kin of the victims asserted yesterday.
Mr Arthur Harvey QC, in an opening statement to the inquiry in Derry on behalf of a number of families represented by Madden & Finucane, solicitors, outlined a searching critique of the 1972 British government, and of the first inquiry it mounted into the shootings.
That inquiry, headed by the British lord chief justice at the time, the late Lord Widgery, is believed by the victims' families to have been procedurally unfair and substantively corrupt, he said. Mr Harvey examined in detail the range of secret and confidential documentation - correspondence and minutes of high-level legal and political discussions - which has been uncovered by the present inquiry.
He asserted that it appeared that Lord Widgery had negotiated the terms of his appointment with the then British prime minister, Mr Edward Heath, in such a way as to exclude any possibility of investigating the involvement of anyone at a political level in the events that led to Bloody Sunday.
By confining his areas of inquiry to the few minutes when men were shot and killed, Lord Widgery had assisted those who were politically responsible.
"The truth is that the 1st Battalion of the Parachute Regiment on the ground was doing no more than what had been envisaged. The truth is that when the disastrous consequences of that day became known to the MoD [Ministry of Defence] and the government of the day, they quite literally launched a cover-up, most cruelly in the name of a public impartial investigation."
The tribunal, chaired by Lord Saville of Newdigate, has resumed after an extended summer recess prolonged by the resignation of one of its members, the New Zealand judge, Sir Edward Somers. He has been replaced by a retired Australian high court judge, Mr John Toohey.