Bloody Sunday paratrooper says shootings 'unjustified'

One of the Bloody Sunday paratroopers today described the shootings 30 years ago as “unjustified”.

The Saville Inquiry, sitting in London, listened to an unedited 90-minute interview which the paratrooper, identified only as 027, gave to Channel 4 in 1997.

027 will be shielded and remain anonymous when he gives his live testimony tomorrow of the events which led to British paratroopers killing 13 unarmed men on a civil rights march in Derry on January 30, 1972.

He said his colleagues in 1 Para started firing “in a spontaneous way” after coming under attack but added: “To my knowledge there were certainly no orders to fire”. His controversial account is strongly contested by other soldiers also on duty on Bloody Sunday.

He said: “The firing started in a spontaneous way, but Parachute soldiers are trained to use their initiative and act quickly and effectively when the situation demands it.

“Obviously a number of soldiers felt that they were justified in what they did.

“I do not believe that to be the case. I think the shootings which I witnessed were unjustified.”

He said they opened fire after what appeared to be incoming rounds which, in retrospect, could have been shots from other Army units on the Derry wall being mistaken or confused for IRA incoming fire.

The situation was “slightly chaotic” and 1 Para, whom he dubbed the “Army’s rottweilers”, moved in to execute an efficient clear-up operation.

“A number of fairly unfortunate, to say the least, decisions were made on the ground which led to some shameful and disgraceful acts being perpetrated,” he said.

“I think that an acknowledgement that’s what happened is long overdue.”

Soldier 027 joined the Parachute Regiment in 1971 when he was 19 and was a radio operator in the regiment’s anti-tank platoon on Bloody Sunday.

The march occurred at a politically sensitive point in Ireland’s troubles. Internment, which had been introduced in August 1971, had injected a new level of violence into the streets.

The night before Bloody Sunday the paras were alerted they were to go to Derry and some were “quite hyped up” because of the “expectation of some sort of conflict was quite high”, he said.

The officials who gave the go-ahead for them to be deployed into such a sensitive situation were “inept or sadly lacking in judgment or wisdom”, he said, claiming the tragic outcome was predictable.

He told the interviewer that Bloody Sunday had been allowed to become a “festering sore” hampering ongoing efforts for peace because the Establishment had not acknowledged that mistakes had been made.

027 said: “If you live in a civilised country, as Britain is, there are certain moral boundaries which the state has a duty to operate within. On this particular a few things went wrong and the fact that has never been acknowledged has left this festering sore.”