(CN) --- A Northern Irish high court judge on Tuesday declared that British soldiers fatally shot innocent civilians, among them a mother of eight and a Catholic priest, nearly 50 years ago in a West Belfast massacre that foreshadowed the infamous Bloody Sunday killings that helped ignite a decades-long sectarian conflict known as the Troubles.
Justice Siobhan Keegan's findings bring to a close a decades-long fight by family members of the victims to put the record straight about the killings in August 1971 in a West Belfast residential district called Ballymurphy. Keegan presided over a new coroner's inquest and she found that nine of 10 civilians were unjustifiably killed by British soldiers, while there was not enough evidence to establish who killed the tenth unarmed victim.
At the time, the official narrative of the British military, mimicked by the British media and officialdom, claimed that those killed were gunmen with the Provisional Irish Republic Army, a paramilitary force fighting against British rule in Ireland.
The killings in Ballymurphy coincided with turmoil sweeping across Northern Ireland in August 1971 after the British government sent the Parachute Regiment, an elite fighting branch of the British army, into Northern Ireland to defeat the IRA. Simultaneously, British authorities began arresting suspected IRA members and holding them without trial, a policy that sparked chaos and anger.
The Parachute Regiment’s killing of civilians in Ballymurphy foreshadowed the regiment’s actions nearly six months later in Londonderry when 13 unarmed civilians were killed in the infamous Bloody Sunday shootings on Jan. 30, 1972.
“The official verdict today is innocent,” said John Teggart, whose father Daniel Teggart was shot 14 times in Ballymurphy, speaking on Sky News television.
He said the inquest laid bare “the lies” of British generals who said “all our loved ones were gunmen and gunwomen.”
“That there's been cleared, that's been dumped and threw in the bin; and the lies that was told have been overturned today,” he said. “That's what our campaign was about. My father can rest in peace and I will rest easy now.”
The inquest into the Ballymurphy massacre, as it has become known, became a highly significant test for efforts in Northern Ireland to properly investigate crimes that occurred during the Troubles, which left more than 3,600 people dead.
It followed the groundbreaking inquest into the Bloody Sunday massacre, which concluded in 2010 with a finding that soldiers fired unjustifiably on unarmed civilians. The Blood Sunday probe began in 1998 and became Britain’s longest and most expensive public inquiry at a cost of about $242 million.
In 2011, under pressure from the families of the victims at Ballymurphy, Northern Ireland's attorney general opened an investigation in the Parachute Regiment’s actions in Ballymurphy.
Keegan's inquest looked at five separate incidents where 10 people were killed. She said there might have been IRA members in Ballymurphy at the time, but she said none of those killed were armed and posed no threat to British soldiers. She said the army's actions were unjustified.
The first shooting occurred on Aug. 9 when Father Hugh Mullan, a Catholic parish priest, was killed after he tried to help a man shot in a field, Keegan found.
“These were innocent men, were not armed and were not acting in any untoward manner,” she said, reading her findings to a courtroom packed with emotional family members of the victims, as reported by the Belfast Telegraph.
Later that day, soldiers killed four others, among them Teggart and Joan Connolly, a 44-year-old mother of eight. She was left by soldiers to bleed for several hours in the field where she was shot. The coroner's report said “there was a basic inhumanity associated with leaving Mrs. Connolly in the field for so long.”
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