Channel 4 ordered to produce Bloody Sunday notes today

Channel 4 was today due to produce before the Bloody Sunday Inquiry notes of interviews with soldiers used in a controversial series of TV reports about the shootings.

An order to bring forward the notes was issued after Lena Ferguson, producer of the reports in 1997, spent several hours in the witness box at the inquiry being questioned about her interviews with five unnamed soldiers.

She had provided the inquiry with only brief notes of the interviews, but not her notebooks, because she said they would identify the soldiers and she had given an undertaking not to do so and she was not prepared to breach that undertaking.

But inquiry chairman Lord Saville said it was clear there was much information in the notebooks which would be of importance to the inquiry and it should be provided with only matters relating to the soldiers identities blanked out.

At the same time lawyers representing both military witnesses and relatives of the 13 people shot dead on Bloody Sunday urged Lord Saville to order Ms Ferguson to provide the names of the soldiers - four of whom remain unknown to the inquiry.

If she and a colleague, reporter Alex Thompson who was due to give evidence today, refuse to do so they could be held in contempt and in theory face jail.