Bloody Sunday occurred on 30 January 1972 in Derry/Londonderry, Northern Ireland, when an illegal march of up to 20,000 civil-rights demonstrators protesting against the British policy of internment was fired on by the British army. A section of the crowd had been stoning soldiers, and the army maintained that shots had been fired at them from the republican Bogside area of the city and that petrol bombers were among the crowd of demonstrators. The consequences of the army's actions were thirteen dead and an injury that would later prove to be fatal. Republicans claimed that their personnel had stood down on that day because they believed that the army wanted to draw them into a full-scale battle. It was not until 1992 that John Major, then prime minister of Great Britain, acknowledged in a letter to the local MP, John Hume, that the victims should be regarded as innocent of any allegation that they had been shot while handling firearms or explosives. It was a tacit acceptance that the original public inquiry under Chief Justice Lord Widgery was flawed in that it was rushed and did not consider all the available evidence. New evidence, including new eyewitness accounts, medical evidence, and new interpretations of ballistics material, as well as a detailed Irish government assessment of the new material and of Lord Widgery's findings in light of all the material available, prompted another inquiry. In a parliamentary statement on 29 January 1998, Prime Minister Tony Blair announced another tribunal to investigate the events of Bloody Sunday, to be chaired by Lord Saville. The novelty of this inquiry was that the government was at least prepared to look at the uncongenial possibility that the killings were unlawful.
There is clear evidence that relations between the local Catholic community and the security forces deteriorated throughout 1971. One particular incident had been the army's killing of two local youths in a Bogside riot in July: an unofficial inquiry chaired by Lord Gifford found that both youths were unarmed. By November the semiweekly local nationalist newspaper, the Derry Journal, recorded incidents such as applause in court after riot charges had been dismissed; strikes and traffic disruption following a wave of protests by teachers, dockers, and factory workers after army raids in the area; the condemnation of army tactics by tenants' associations after soldiers had killed a mother of six children and 4,000 people had attended her funeral; a meeting of 500 business and professional people to support a campaign of passive resistance; and the army detention of John Hume after he had refused to be searched. The army's own records show that following the two July killings, the Catholic community had "instantly turned from benevolent support to community alienation." The situation was compounded in August with the introduction of internment, so that "all combined to lead to a situation in which the security forces were faced by ...
