Britain bans prosecution of past Catholic and Protestant killings in Northern Ireland

BELFAST, Northern Ireland, and LONDON — It was a warm June night in 1991 when a phone call came that would change Martha Seaman's life forever.

It was her son's fiancée, and she was crying.

"That was the beginning of a lifetime of misery," Seaman, now 80, says. "To this day, I don't think I'll ever get over it."

Seaman's first-born, Tony Harrison, was a 21-year-old British paratrooper stationed in Belfast at the height of the so-called "Troubles" — fighting between Roman Catholics and Protestants.

What began in 1969 as a peacekeeping mission to maintain law and order evolved into the British Army's longest-ever deployment, involving a quarter-million troops over four decades. More than 3,500 soldiers, rival paramilitaries and civilians were killed.

That night, Harrison became