Britain's Channel 4 News last night televised evidence that successive British governments have sustained a cover-up on Bloody Sunday for 25 years. The evidence was confirmed by an Irish writer who has found proof of previously undisclosed British Army gunfire against a peaceful Irish civil-rights demonstration.

"I would like to see the case reopened, that is the first priority," said John Kelly, whose brother Michael was a victim of one of the British region's most controversial episodes when paratroopers opened fire at an Irish civil rights rally.

An official inquiry headed by Lord Widgery, Lord Chief Justice, exonerated troops saying that they had come under fire.

But locals have long dismissed the findings as a white-wash and an attempt to vilify the casualties who were unarmed victims of the deliberate shootings on Sunday, January 30 1972.

There has never been a formal British government apology for the Bloody Sunday killings, and no soldiers were ever charged in connection with the deaths and injuries.

"Murder was committed that day in the name of the British government," Kelly, chairman of a families' Bloody Sunday Justice Campaign, told Reuters.

A report on Channel 4 News based on audio tapes of military radio messages "suppressed since the official inquiry," which refused to accept them as evidence because they had been illegally obtained.

The programme was aired on Friday night ahead of the 25th anniversary of Bloody Sunday and against a background of renewed conflict in Ireland.

"Recorded by a radio ham, the tapes prove that soldiers other than the Parachute Regiment were positioned along the old City Walls of Londonderry [sic] and indicate that these men fired and hit civilians," the television news organisation said.

"Channel 4 News has obtained post mortem evidence which shows that at least three unarmed men were killed by bullets fired down through their bodies from above. "The City Walls are located high above the Bogside area where people were killed and are in direct line of sight to where the three men fell."

A separate investigation by an Irish human rights activist, Don Mullan, who studied many of the original first-hand accounts, turned up a similar finding.

He uncovered almost 50 statements from people who said soldiers were positioned on the walls and many were "very clear that firing was coming" from that vicinity, he said.

Mullan, whose "Eyewitness Bloody Sunday" is published on Saturday, said: "Widgery confines himself to...the 108 rounds allegedly fired by paratroopers at ground level. He did not deal with the role of the British army on the walls."

Three of the victims had been hit from a 45 degree angle. Mullan said that from the statements and autopsy reports, an independent ballistic expert, Robert Breglio, who had spent 25 years with the New York City Police Department, had concluded that they were likely to have been "hit by a single marksman using a telescopic sight operating from a height."

"I think that the case must be reopened because we have always known that these people wre murdered. We have raised enough suspicion... to warrant an investigation, especially into these three, and preferably into all 13 killed that day," Mullan said.

Corroborating evidence by a Derry GP, Dr Raymond McClean, who attended the dead and wounded, indicated that the trajectory of the bullets which killed these three was such that they could only have been fired from the area of the walls.

Dr McClean told Channel 4: "I wrote a detailed submission to Widgery and I was told my evidence would not be required ... I just could not believe it."

Dr McClean's assessment was supported on last night's programme by a former British army surgeon, Mr Hugh Thomas.

A compendium of hundreds of eyewitness statements, uncovered and analysed by Mr Don Mullan in a book to be published next Tuesday, reveals at least 45 separate claims by witnesses that shooting took place from the Derry city walls as well as from Parachute Regiment soldiers at ground level.

These statements were also made available to the Widgery Tribunal, but were not explored in evidence.

And a hand-written note by a British official after the murders discovered by Mr Mullan indicates that the outcome of the tribunal had been pre-determined: "LCJ (the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Widgery) will pile up the case against the deceased . . . but will conclude that he cannot find with certainty that any one of 13 was a gunman."

The British government, moving quickly to stem international interest in the story, rejected the demands for a fresh investigation into the Bloody Sunday killings.

"There are no plans to set up a further inquiry," a British official said yesterday.

Last night Sinn Fein chairman Mitchel McLaughlin, who is from Derry, called on all political parties in Ireland to demand an international independent inquiry under the auspices of the European Court of Human Rights.

He said: "The dead and injured were deliberately vilified in a carefully orchestrated Government propaganda exercise to make the world believe that what happened in Derry was not mass murder, sanctioned at the highest level of the British cabinet."

From RM_Distribution, an Irish Republican news and information service.

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