Bloody Sunday 'was like turkey shoot' - witness

The son of a leading politician who witnessed two of the shootings on Bloody Sunday tried to forgive the British Paratroopers responsible the following day, the Saville Inquiry heard today.

Eamon McAteer also told the hearing in Derry that he accompanied Provisional IRA man Shane Paul O’Doherty on the ill-fated civil rights march in the city three decades ago - and insisted he saw no gunmen or bombers that day.

Mr McAteer, whose father Eddie was a Nationalist Party Stormont MP in the early days of the Northern Ireland troubles, was among the men arrested by troops on Bloody Sunday and held in the city’s Fort George Army base in the hours afterwards.

Thirteen men and youths were shot dead when soldiers opened fire in Derry’s Bogside district in the aftermath of an anti-internment demonstration on January 30 1972.

Mr McAteer described two of the victims being shot as they fled the gunfire and stated: ‘‘It was like a grouse or a turkey shoot.’’