NEW EYEWITNESS accounts of the shootings of 11 people by British soldiers in Northern Ireland were submitted to the North’s Attorney General yesterday in a bid to get fresh inquests opened.
The statements form part of a file of information related to the shootings in Ballymurphy, in west Belfast, in 1971 that has been compiled by the victims’ families.
Archive testimony of the killings collected by the Catholic Church and full autopsy reports are also included in the submission to John Larkin QC.
The families are dissatisfied with the open verdicts delivered in the original inquests, held in the wake of the controversial shootings by British paratroopers, and have asked Mr Larkin to establish new investigations. Relatives continue to demand an independent international investigation into the events of August 1971, when the army stormed the nationalist area after the Northern Ireland government introduced internment without trial.
A Catholic priest and a mother of eight were among the 11 shot dead during a three-day operation designed to round up suspected republican paramilitaries.
The killings happened months before Parachute Regiment soldiers killed 14 civil rights marchers in Derry in 1972. Briege Voyle, whose mother Joan Connolly was killed in Ballymurphy, expressed hope the file contained enough evidence to persuade Mr Larkin. “Some of this was available at the time of our loved ones’ murders and was not considered,” she said.
“The families, for over the last 20 years, have collected information from eyewitnesses to the massacre, along with full autopsy reports that were previously withheld from the families, and hope the Attorney General may open the inquest into the death of our loved ones and consider investigating the circumstances around their murder and conclude they were brutally murdered.”
The relatives have stopped short of demanding an investigation along the lines of the costly Bloody Sunday inquiry.
In July, the Catholic Church, which is backing the families’ campaign, released previously undisclosed files clergy had put together on the shootings.
Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams was among the delegation that handed the submission to the Attorney General’s office in Belfast. He said the appointment of the North’s first Attorney General in 38 years – Mr Larkin took up post this year following the devolution of policing and justice powers to Stormont – had enabled the legal bid. “They want an independent international investigation into the deaths of their loved ones and an apology from the British government which recognises their innocence.”
A spokesman for Mr Larkin confirmed the submission had been received and said the Attorney General would now take time to review it. – (PA)