BBC News with David Austin

An inquiry into the events, known as Bloody Sunday when 13 civilians were shot dead by British soldiers in Londonderry in Northern Ireland in 1972, has found that what happened was "

unjustified

and unjustifiable".

Addressing parliament, the British Prime Minister David Cameron apologized on behalf of the government and the country. He said he hoped the inquiry's findings would help the process of reconciliation.

"Bloody Sunday was a tragedy for the

bereave

d and the wounded, and a catastrophe for the people of Northern Ireland. Those are words we cannot and must not ignore.

But I hope what this report can also do is mark the moment when we come together in this House and in the communities we represent. Come together to

acknowledge

our shared history, even where it divides us, and come together to close this painful chapter on Northern Ireland's troubled past."

The Saville inquiry, named after the man who headed it, was set up in 1998 after an earlier investigation largely exonerated the army. It's the longest and most expensive inquiry in British legal history. Norman Smith assesses its main findings.

Lord Saville's report paints a damning picture of the actions of British paratroopers on the streets of Londonderry. Orders, he says, were disobeyed; shots were fired without warning. Civilians were fired at or they lay on the ground over just yards away. And this, despite the fact there was no threat to the paratroopers from the civil rights protesters. The casualties, said Lord Saville, were the victims of unjustified firing by the soldiers. None of them were armed. Lord Saville also accuses some of the paratroopers of giving knowingly untrue and false accounts to the inquiry, opening up the possibility of prosecution for