‘WE WILL continue on and hopefully get the rest of the perpetrators to justice, because there are legal means to get them prosecuted and bring them to the courts, so the campaign of the Bloody Sunday Families is not finished yet,’ John Kelly – whose brother Michael Kelly was one of those who were killed in the Bloody Sunday Massacre – said yesterday.
A special press conference had been called where the families responded to the news that only one soldier that was there on that day in 1972 will be prosecuted.
The government announced that the Ministry of Defence will be funding the soldiers legal expenses.
Kelly said: ‘Do not deny us justice any longer,’ adding: ‘We have one soldier, soldier F and he was responsible for the murder of five individuals that day.
‘But he has now been put in the frame for two, William McKinney and Kenny Jim Wray and the injury of four others.
‘Their victory is our victory.
‘“To deny people their human rights is to challenge their very humanity,” said Nelson Mandela.
‘We have walked the long journey since our fathers and brothers were brutally slaughtered on the streets of Derry on Bloody Sunday.
‘Over that passage of time all the parents of the deceased have died. We are here to take their place.
‘Bloody Sunday was not just a wanton act carried out by a trained army against defenceless civil rights activists, it also created a deep legacy of hurt and injustice, and deepened and prolonged a bloody conflict unimaginable even in those dark winter days of 1972.’
The families of those who had been killed on that day then read out a statement: ‘We would like to remind everyone that no prosecution, no conviction does not mean not guilty.
‘It does not mean that no crime was committed. It does not mean that those soldiers acted in a dignified and appropriate way.
‘It simply means that if these claims had been investigated properly when they happened, had evidence been gathered at the time, the outcome would have been different.
‘We know that Lord Saville’s report findings on the actions of soldiers that day, that all the casualties were either intended targets of the soldiers or the result of shots fired indiscriminately at people, that no soldiers fired in response to attacks or threatened attacks, that no soldiers fired in a state of panic.’
