The Five Demands

Bloody Sunday troops face murder arrests (The Sunday Times)

UP TO 20 retired British soldiers face being arrested and questioned by police for murder, attempted murder or criminal injury over the Bloody Sunday shootings more than 40 years ago.

The Ministry of Defence has started hiring lawyers who will represent the soldiers, most in their sixties and seventies, when they are questioned under criminal caution about their roles in the shootings.

Some of the soldiers who opened fire on marchers, killing 14, may face prosecution and a trial that will reopen wounds from one of the most notorious incidents in the history of the Troubles.

The move comes three years after the £200m, 12-year inquiry by Lord Saville into the shootings produced its report. Saville found that all those shot by paratroopers during a Catholic civil rights march in the nationalist Bogside area of Londonderry in January 1972 were unarmed, and that the killings were both “unjustified and unjustifiable”.