Bloody Sunday Inquiry

After nearly three decades of controversy and grief, a public inquiry opened Monday into the 1972 Bloody Sunday shooting deaths of 13 Catholic protesters in a Londonderry street, the worst mass killing by British troops in Northern Ireland. Relatives and friends of the victims filled Londonderry’s Guildhall for the biggest public inquiry in British legal history. The hearing, before three judges, is expected to last two years and will take evidence from 500 people. The killings were a defining moment in Northern Ireland’s past three decades of conflict, engendering a deep-rooted bitterness toward the British and driving scores of Catholics to join the Irish Republican Army.