Sinn Féin: Soldiers who shot Irish Catholics in 1972 ‘get away with murder’

 

Sinn Féin: Soldiers who shot Irish Catholics in 1972 ‘get away with murder’

 

Northern Ireland’s chief prosecutor has dropped charges against Troubles-era troops who killed Bloody Sunday protesters and a 15-year-old boy.

 

BY SHAWN POGATCHNIK

July 2, 2021 6:45 pm

https://www.politico.eu/article/british-soldiers-northern-ireland-troubles-get-away-with-murder-say-sinn-fein/

 

Prosecutors dropped charges Friday against two British ex-soldiers who killed Catholic civilians in Northern Ireland nearly a half-century ago, a move that Sinn Féin decried as letting them “get away with murder.”

 

The reversal highlighted one of the biggest tension points in Northern Ireland’s cross-community government: how to achieve justice for families of nearly 3,700 people slain during the three-decade conflict over the U.K. region.

 

While the Irish nationalists of Sinn Féin want former soldiers involved in killings to be convicted, British unionists want them shielded — and for Irish Republican Army veterans, some of them still within Sinn Féin ranks, to be prosecuted instead.

 

The British and Irish governments have just launched a new joint effort to address both sides’ competing demands. It marks the third attempt to break the deadlock on “legacy” disputes from the Troubles following similar attempts in 2014 and 2018.

 

Northern Ireland’s Public Prosecution Service director Stephen Herron said his office had concluded that previous statements given by the two men, identified only as Soldier B and Soldier F, were inadmissible because they had not been arrested, legally represented or properly cautioned against incriminating themselves.

 

“I recognize that these decisions bring further pain to those who have relentlessly and with great dignity sought justice for almost 50 years,” said Herron, who met some of the victims’ relatives ahead of the announcement.

 

Soldier B had admitted fatally shooting a 15-year-old boy, Daniel Hegarty, twice in the head in Derry/Londonderry during the predawn launch of Operation Motorman, the biggest military action of the entire conflict, on July 31, 1972. He was charged in 2019, three years after Northern Ireland’s previous chief prosecutor had rejected that move.

 

In the case against Soldier F, prosecutors were chiefly relying on statements made by fellow soldiers who had identified him as the one responsible for fatally shooting two of the 13 unarmed Catholic protesters killed on Bloody Sunday, January 30, 1972.

 

But Herron said those statements taken from Soldier F and his comrades suffered from “historical investigative defects.”

 

Prosecutors already had declined to press charges against any other ex-soldiers who shot demonstrators on Bloody Sunday, the largest mass killing committed by British troops in Northern Ireland.

 

In May, Herron’s office halted prosecutions against Soldiers A and C, who had been charged with murdering an unarmed IRA member in Belfast, also in 1972.

 

That year was the deadliest in the 30-year conflict over Northern Ireland, when Britain shut down the U.K. region’s Protestant-dominated government and took direct control. Among nearly 500 people slain in 1972, at least 254 were killed by the Irish Republican Army, 121 by unionist extremists, 80 by the British army and six by police.

 

Sinn Féin lawmaker Gerry Kelly — an IRA veteran involved in the outlawed group’s first car bomb attacks in London in 1973 — said the soldiers “who gunned down peaceful protestors and a child in Derry acted with impunity and are being assisted by the state to get away with murder.”

 

But former U.K. Defence Minister Johnny Mercer, who has campaigned for soldiers involved in Troubles-era killings to gain amnesty from prosecution, said Soldiers B and F “should be left to get on with the rest of their lives and not be endlessly chased.”