Twenty-five years later, respected Irish churchman Edward Daly says he will not rest easy until victims of "Bloody Sunday" a bloodstained landmark in the troubled history of Northern Ireland, are exonerated.

Thirteen Catholics were shot dead on the crisp, sunny afternoon of January 30, 1972. The gunmen were not guerrilla tearaways but members of Britain's crack Parachute Regiment sent to keep the peace.

"I would like to be able to leave it to rest but the events of that day still haunt me...Until their innocence is accepted by those who murdered them, I still feel responsible for proclaiming their innocence," Daly said.

Ill health forced him to retire a few years ago as Londonderry's Roman Catholic bishop. He was a young priest when Northern Ireland's violent troubles erupted, when Catholics marched to demand civil rights from the pro-British Protestant-led provincial government before the onset of sustained guerrilla war.

A photograph of amateur boxer Jackie Duddy, bulbous gloves guarding a cheeky grin, stands in Daly's sitting room.

"I heard the first shot ring out," Daly said, recalling how he, Duddy and and other civilians scattered for cover as armoured vehicles suddenly advanced.

"I saw him look at me. He was kind of smiling -- you know, a mixture of fear and laughter. He gasped simultaneously with the shot and he fell." Daly tended him as he lay dying.

Duddy, at 17, was the youngest to die that day..

DEFINING MOMENT

Bloody Sunday was a defining moment in the current era of conflict over British rule in Northern Ireland. Security analysts and politicians concede that it marked the end of a sort of phoney war and the start of all-out violence.

Disaffected Catholic youths swelled the ranks of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) because of it and joined its hit-and-run campaign to drive Britain from Ireland.

Whining, high-velocity bullets terrified the crowd of nationalists at a rally protesting at Britain's internment of several hundred Catholics opposed to rule from London.

After 15 minutes, 13 lay dead at a makeshift street barricade under the shadow of a high apartment block, near rows of neat homes with net curtains and ornaments on the sills.

Britain called in its Lord Chief Justice, Lord Widgery. Silver-haired, urbane, courteous and commanding, it was soon evident that he spoke a different language from the local Catholics, who saw themselves as fighting a civil rights struggle as just as that of U.S. blacks.

Catholics were unanimous in calling the shooting unprovoked murder and ridiculed the army version that troops themselves had come under heavy gunfire.

Widgery exonerated the soldiers, saying some of the dead might have been armed before they were hit. He said troops came under fire when they tried to arrest rioters after clashes on the fringe of the rally.

Catholics say the Widgery Report was "a whitewash" which slandered unarmed people who were caught in a hail of army fire.

Local doctor Raymond McClean treated two civilians who were wounded some 15 minutes before the heaviest army firing began. One them died several months later and is regarded as the 14th victim of Bloody Sunday.

"I pronounced four people dead on the steet. I submitted a detailed report to Widgery but I was told my evidence was not required. They didn't want to hear," said McClean, who served as a doctor in Britain's Royal Air Force.

To relatives and the people of Londonderry, Bloody Sunday is an open wound which will not be healed until Britain admits that its troops were culpable and the victims are totally exonerated.

"They should be declared innocent of any crime whatsoever. I live and breathe Bloody Sunday because of the injustice," said John Kelly, whose brother was shot dead.

NEW EVIDENCE

Britain's Channel 4 television news and Don Mullan, an Irish human rights activist, have both come up with new evidence that soldiers may have opened fire from the 17th century city walls above the Catholic Bogside area.

Mullan said Widgery dealt only with the rounds fired by paratroopers at ground level but said eyewitness statements and ballistics opinion suggested three of the victims may have been killed by army sniper fire from the walls. "This was not the paratroopers coming in on a scoop-up arrest operation. This was the working out of a much wider military operation on that day," said Mullan, who has studied original statements by civilians for a new book "Eye Witness Bloody Sunday."

Daly said one lesson of Bloody Sunday was that military punishment of civilians in peaceful protest does not work.

"I think it is imperative that the British government quite unequivocally admits what happened, in other words that paratroopers deliberately killed innocent civilians -- picking them out and targetting them individually -- and apologise for it."

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