Hundreds to join demo for justice at Parliament

HUNDREDS of veterans of the Troubles in Northern Ireland plan to demonstrate outside Parliament in anger at their treatment.

The former soldiers will gather in Westminster a week on Friday to show their support for a bill to set a 10-year time limit on prosecuting the military.

The Private Members’ Bill, being introduced by Tory MP and ex-infantry officer Richard Benyon, would apply to troops serving in any conflict in the world.

Mr Benyon has said that the issue is “personal to me” because seven members of his Royal Green Jackets battalion, all bandsmen, were killed by the Regent’s Park bomb on July 20, 1982.

The IRA detonated the device under a bandstand hours after another bomb at Hyde Park killed four Blues and Royals cavalrymen and seven horses.

Mr Benyon said last year: “There are now hideous circumstances in which elderly men are taken from their families in the early hours and flown to Belfast for questioning.

“We have serving and former soldiers subjected to ludicrous processes of lawyers accessing public funds to go after them with bogus claims.

“In some cases soldiers are being hounded into old age. This has got to be gripped.”

The march is being organised by the 24,000-strong pressure group Justice for Northern Ireland Veterans.

It is also crowdfunding to make a documentary, The Great Betrayal, to tell its side of the longest-ever operation by the UK military, the 38-year Operation Banner.

JNIV founder Alan Barry pointed to the early release from jail of IRA terrorists under the Good Friday Agreement and the “comfort letters” from Tony Blair.

Mr Barry added: “Why is it right that British veterans are persecuted and terrorists walk free?”