The acquittal of the British soldier known as “Soldier F” for the killings of James Wray and William McKinney on Bloody Sunday is not an end to a chapter in British history, as some commentators suggest. It is just a chapter closure in a long and painful record of delayed military justice, Ministry of Defence obfuscation, and endemic media misreporting.
Fifty-three years after British troops shot unarmed civil rights demonstrators on the streets of Derry. Since then not one person has been held criminally responsible. Not one.
That fact alone should trouble any society that claims to value the rule of law.
When thirteen people were killed and fifteen more injured on 30 January 1972, the British state’s immediate instinct was not to investigate but to justify.
The Widgery Tribunal, rushed through in weeks, accepted the Army’s narrative that the paratroopers had been responding to gunfire. The victims were smeared as gunmen and bombers. Widgery refused to take evidence from many civilian eyewitnesses.
Widgery was to exonerate the Army. He said that while “None of the dead or wounded is proved to have been shot whilst handling a firearm or bomb …there is a strong suspicion that some…had been firing weapons or handling bombs …others had been closely supporting them.”
Only decades later, after persistent campaigning by the families, did the Saville Inquiry overturn that fiction.
That inquiry describing the shootings as “unjustified and unjustifiable.”
“The early firing in William Street resulted in two wounded casualties,” the inquiry concluded, “neither of whom was doing anything that justified either of them being shot.”
Furthermore, it noted that “The soldiers of Support Company who went into the Bogside did so as the result of an order by Colonel Wilford, which should not have been given and which was contrary to the orders that he had received from Brigadier MacLellan.” Colonel Wilford died in 2023 with his OBE still intact.
And that “none of the firing by the soldiers of Support Company was aimed at people posing a threat of causing death or serious injury.”
This truth, when it finally came, was – however – not followed by justice.
Soldier F was the only veteran ever to face trial. Wilford never did.
Soldier’s F’s prosecution was based largely on the statements of two other soldiers, described by the judge as “serially untruthful.” The court accepted that he and others had “totally lost all sense of military discipline” that day, yet he was acquitted of all charges because the remaining evidence was deemed unreliable.
What the law could no longer prove, history already knew: that innocent people were gunned down by a British unit that had lost control.
That it has taken more than half a century to reach this point is itself an indictment of Britain’s institutions. The passage of time has served the state, not the victims. Key witnesses have died; others have forgotten. Files have gone missing, memories faded, and opportunities to gather forensic evidence lost forever. The judge himself noted that delay had “seriously hampered” the search for truth.
But such delay was not inevitable. Rather, it was the result of deliberate inaction. For years the Ministry of Defence and successive governments resisted full disclosure. For years the Police Service of Northern Ireland failed to investigate properly.
The result is a hollowed-out justice that arrives so late and so weightless that it has long lost its moral power.
This pattern is not unique to Northern Ireland. Deny. Delay. Debride. Defer. Distance.
This same slow grind of official reluctance has characterised British responses to allegations of war crimes elsewhere, from Kenya and Malaya to Iraq and Afghanistan. Time and again, soldiers accused of mistreating detainees or killing civilians have escaped sanction, often protected by the very institutions charged with investigating them.
The Overseas Operations Act, passed in 2021, placed a five-year limit on prosecutions for crimes committed by British forces abroad. It was, effectively, legislating delay as impunity. The Bloody Sunday families’ half-century struggle shows just how effective such delay can be in ensuring no one is ever held accountable.
Yet even as the courts have failed to deliver justice, much of the British media has compounded the injury. Coverage of the verdict has tended to frame the acquittal as closure, an opportunity to “draw a line” under the past. Such phrasing betrays a profound misunderstanding of justice.
Closure cannot be declared from Westminster or Whitehall or Fleet Street. Closure is a dignity that belongs only to those who lost loved ones and those alone.
Nor does it acknowledge that this single prosecution, focused on one man while ignoring the chain of command, was never adequate to the scale of the crime.
The reporting has also too often echoed the rhetoric of politicians and veterans’ groups who claim that elderly soldiers are being “hounded.” That narrative ignores the simple reality that the real hounding has been endured by the families of the dead. They have faced decades of denial and deflection, accused of politicising their grief while the state that killed their relatives shielded those responsible. Meanwhile their dead have been tainted with the implicit accusation they somehow deserved their mudered.
This is not “common sense,” as one MP blithely put it. There is no sense in accepting a verdict born of delay and evidentiary decay as justice done.
This is, rather, a sentiment of moral convenience paraded as justice and reason.
What should trouble Britain most is not merely that closure and justice was denied in this case, but that its denial fits a pattern we have seen again and again, and will see again and again.
When it comes to the actions of its own soldiers, Britain quickly finds reasons not to prosecute. Investigations are under-resourced or biased from the get go, evidence is too often withheld on “national security” grounds, witnesses are given the benefit of unquestioned anonymity, and victims are framed as ‘the enemy’.
Such behaviour erodes public trust and undermines Britain’s claim to moral leadership. How can a country lecture others on the importance of international humanitarian law when it cannot face its own record?
This verdict is a victory for unaccountability and impunity. Nothing more.
Did you find this story interesting? Please support AOAV's work and donate.
Donate