Lord Saville
The man at the centre of the Bloody Sunday Inquiry is its chairman, Lord Saville of Newdigate.
Mark Saville was born in 1936. He is married with two sons. He was educated at Rye Grammar School, a state school in East Sussex. He won a scholarship to Brasenose College, Oxford, where he read law. He was the star student of his year and gained a first-class degree.
He served as a second lieutenant in the Royal Sussex Regiment from 1954 to 1956.
He was called to the bar in 1962 and became a Queen's Counsel in 1975. He is renowned as a hard worker with a brilliant legal mind. He quickly rose through the ranks of the senior judiciary, sitting as a judge in the High Court in 1985, before becoming a Lord Justice of Appeal in 1994.
He was appointed a law lord in 1997 - although at 61 he was regarded very much as the 'baby' of the House of Lords. In 1998 Prime Minister Tony Blair invited him to chair a new Tribunal of Inquiry into the events of Bloody Sunday.
Despite being 74 years old, Lord Saville remains fit and active. He has a private pilot's licence and flies his own plane. He enjoys hiking and has recently travelled into the wilderness in the American Rockies, whitewater canoeing alone. Lord Saville is a man of contradictions. The English law lord who is also something of a daredevil.
Christopher Clarke
Christopher Clarke's official title was Counsel to the Bloody Sunday Inquiry. In effect, this meant he was the driving force behind this mammoth investigation.
He is regarded by senior QCs as a man of a formidable legal skill. His towering intellect earned him the nickname "Two Brains". It was his task to deliver the Inquiry's opening statement. It lasted 42 days and consisted of 1.25 million words. It is by far the longest in UK legal history.
He made clear the inquiry was seeking to discover what really happened on Bloody Sunday. In his opening speech he said: "What happened - whatever the truth of the matter - was a tragedy, the pain for which many have endured down the passage of years. The tribunal's task is to discover as far as humanly possible in the circumstances, the truth. It is the truth as people see it. Not the truth as people would like it to be, but the truth, pure and simple, painful or unacceptable to whoever that truth may be."
In 2005 he was knighted and appointed a High Court judge.
Martin McGuinness
Martin McGuinness is one of the major figures within republicanism. He has gone from IRA commander in the Bogside to Deputy First Minister in Stormont.
He had always refused to speak openly about his IRA past, so his appearance as a witness at the Bloody Sunday Inquiry in 2003 was a major media event. He revealed that he had turned to republicanism in the 1960s and as the Troubles erupted in Derry he joined the IRA. When the organisation split he initially went with the Official IRA, but by the early 1970s he had switched to the Provisional IRA and was second in command of the Provisionals in Derry.
An MI5 informer, codenamed Infliction, claimed Martin McGuinness fired the first shot on Bloody Sunday - a single shot from a Thompson submachinegun. Mr Guinness entered the witness box at the Saville Inquiry to describe the allegation as "fantasy".
Mr McGuinness, who was 21 on Bloody Sunday, said there were about 40-50 Provisionals in Derry at the time. He told the inquiry the PIRA saw itself as in a state of war with British forces. Asked by Christopher Clarke, Counsel to the Inquiry, if this meant shooting them, Mr McGuinness replied: "Absolutely, yes."
But on Bloody Sunday he claimed the Provisional IRA in Derry obeyed orders not to attack soldiers at what was to be a peaceful demonstration against internment. "The orders to the volunteers were very clear and the orders were that under no circumstances whatsoever were they to engage with the British army during the course of the civil rights protest," he said.
Bishop Edward Daly
Edward Daly is a native of County Fermanagh but Bloody Sunday has left him forever linked to Derry.
At the time he was a priest at Saint Eugene's Cathedral in the Bogside and he had gone out to comfort elderly residents who were frightened by rioting in the William Street area. When the Parachute Regiment advanced into the Bogside, Fr Daly found himself caught amongst the fleeing crowd of civilians.
He was just yards away when he saw 17 years old Jackie Duddy shot in the back. A number of men carried Duddy's body through the army lines, with Edward Daly leading the way and waving a white handkerchief stained with the teenager's blood. That moment has become the defining image of Bloody Sunday.
In 1973 he left Derry to work as a religious adviser to RTE, but he returned to the city a year later when he was appointed Bishop of Derry. He retired as Bishop in 1993 after suffering a stroke and now serves as chaplain to the Foyle Hospice.
He gave evidence before Lord Saville in 2001 and said: "Certainly there was no threat posed to the army at the time they opened fire, none. I don't think there was any justification for it."
Colonel Derek Wilford
In 1972 Derek Wilford was the commanding officer of the 1st Battalion of the Parachute Regiment - the British Army's elite shock troops.
On Bloody Sunday he claimed his soldiers had been fired at from a number of positions and had been subject to attacked with petrol bombs and acid. When he gave evidence to Lord Saville in 2003 he continued to defend the men who had been under his command. He insisted the paratroopers had acted professionally on January 30 1972.
Colonel Wilford told the tribunal he saw or heard nothing which led him to believe paratroopers were out of control at any stage on Bloody Sunday. "Nor did I see any shameful and disgraceful acts," he said.
Derek Wilford was regarded as a high-flyer within the British Army, but the furore surrounding Bloody Sunday shrouded his military in controversy and he resented the decision to call a new inquiry. He said: "I feel bitterly betrayed by the Government. It seems that it believes in peace at any price - and the price is going to be our heads."
The Bloody Sunday families have always regarded it as an insult that Colonel Wilford was decorated by the Queen shortly after Bloody Sunday.
Colonel Wilford is now retired and lives abroad. His son Jamie continue the family association with the Parachute Regiment. He is a senior Para officer and has served in Iraq.
General Sir Mike Jackson
Bloody Sunday did not blight the career of Mike Jackson. In 1972 he was a Captain and acted as Adjutant to the Parachute Regiment's First Battalion. By the time he retired in 2006 he was a General, had been knighted by the Queen and was Chief of the General Staff - the most senior officer in the British Army.
General Sir Mike Jackson was the last army officer who served on Bloody Sunday to retire. He has since said he has "no doubt that innocent people were shot".
But the Sheffield-born soldier found his appearance before the Saville Inquiry shrouded in controversy. The Inquiry had uncovered a handwritten document composed by the then Captain Jackson within hours of the Bloody Sunday shootings. In this document, which was left inside an unlocked cabinet in a Derry army base, Jackson claimed the Paratroopers shot at gunmen and bombers.
The document failed to explain why 27 unarmed civilians had been shot, with 13 of them killed. He told Lord Saville: "If it is to be suggested that there was attempt by anyone to sanitise ... a true version of events, for whatever reason, I would emphatically reject such a suggestion."
Mike Jackson, who was born in 1944, joined the Army as a 19 year old and was commissioned into the Intelligence Corps. He soon was transferred to the Parachute Regiment.
After Bloody Sunday he rose through the Army's ranks and in the mid-80s he returned to the 1st Battalion the Parachute Regiment as commanding officer. Among his troops he had a reputation for being severe, and his gaunt features earned him the nicknames "Darth Vader" and the "Prince of Darkness".
He later commanded NATO's Allied Rapid Reaction Force in the Balkan conflict before becoming the British Army's Chief of the General Staff in 2003.