UK army used ‘disproportionate’ force in 1971 N Ireland killings

BELFAST: A coroner in Northern Ireland on Tuesday ruled that the British army used "clearly disproportionate" force during violence nearly 50 years ago that saw 10 civilians shot dead.

"All of the deceased in this series of inquests were entirely innocent of any wrongdoing," judge Siobhan Keegan told a hearing into the deaths in Ballymurphy, west Belfast, over three days in August 1971.

The 10 people -- including a priest and a mother of eight children -- were killed at the height of "The Troubles", a sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland which raged over three decades until 1998.

The inquest found that all but one were shot by British soldiers, who had been despatched to the province on a peacekeeping mission in 1969. In the remaining case the coroner could not make a "definitive finding" over who fired the fatal shot, according to her inquest summary.

Keegan split the 10 deaths into five investigations and delivered various verdicts including that there was "no convincing evidence... to justify the shooting of the deceased" and "no justification provided by the army".

In the case of one man the coroner "described the inadequacy of the original investigation as shocking", the summary said. The courtroom rang out with applause from families after each of the five verdicts was delivered over the course of three hours.

Dozens of relatives arrived at the court earlier in the day, clutching pictures of their loved ones and wearing T-shirts bearing their portraits. "It’s been 50 years," a tearful Joan Connolly, the 63-year-old daughter of one of the dead, told AFP. "It’s destroyed our lives, it really has. But we have justice today, we have peace. We have cleared my mummy’s name," she said.