Soldiers 'intended to ambush IRA leaders on Bloody Sunday'

The Saville Inquiry in Derry has heard that British soldiers set out to ambush the leaders of the IRA in Derry on Bloody Sunday 30 years ago.

Former Sunday Times reporter Murray Sayle told the inquiry today that he believed the paratroopers were expected to confront IRA men at the head of the Catholic civil rights march where 13 unarmed civilians were eventually shot dead.

Mr Sayle said the British soldiers were "proposing to surround and defend themselves against, if necessary, a presumed group of IRA militants who would have been at the head of the demonstration and who I understood initially did intend to be there."

Mr Sayle, who covered the Vietnam and Arab-Israeli wars, told the inquiry that he travelled to Derry in the wake of Bloody Sunday to research and write an article which was never published.

In his statement to the inquiry, he said that he believed a snatch squad of paratroopers intended to lie in wait and engage in "normal aggro" with locals when the march was over with the intention of arresting IRA members.

"Civilian casualties would than have been likely," Mr Sayle said, "as the perpetrators of ‘normal aggro’ were seldom, if ever, IRA members, whose use of violence was much more focused and deadly."