Bloody Sunday: 'No cover-up over IRA deaths'
IRA men could not have been shot dead on Bloody Sunday and their deaths kept secret, the Saville Inquiry into the deaths of 13 civilians shot dead by paratroopers 30 year ago was told today.
It has long been the claim of lawyers acting for military witnesses at the inquiry that there were 34 people shot on January 30 1972 who have not been accounted for and their suggestion has been they included IRA members secretly taken away from the scene.
But former Sunday Times Insight team journalist Peter Pringle dismissed the idea of hidden IRA deaths during his second day in the witness box at the inquiry in Derry’s Guildhall.
Mr Pringle, now a freelance journalist living in New York, was part of the newspaper’s team that carried out a major months-long investigation in 1972 into the Bloody Sunday shootings and in 2000 wrote a book with a fellow team member about the event.
Edwin Glasgow QC, who is representing a number of soldiers involved in Bloody Sunday, pressed Mr Pringle about the possibility of hidden IRA deaths.
But Mr Pringle insisted: ‘‘I think it is impossible for other people to have been killed on that day.’’
He was satisfied information given to him by both the Official IRA and the Provisional IRA that they had not lost any men was accurate.
In his written statement to the inquiry Mr Pringle had said an IRA man who was killed became ‘‘a hero’’ in the community. ‘‘It is not their credo to cover up a death.
‘‘The idea that the IRA could impose a wall of silence over a community where one of their sons had been killed just does not ring true.’’
Mr Pringle said the Insight team contacted Letterkenny Hospital across the border in Co Donegal and were told no one with gunshot wounds had been admitted and gave no indication of dead being taken there rather than to the Altnagelvin Hospital in Derry where the known casualties were taken.
He also rejected suggestions from Mr Glasgow that civilian witnesses to Bloody Sunday had lied to him about what had happened.
It had been ‘‘a terrifying time for them and it was seared into the memory,’’ he said.
They had gone though a ‘‘tremendously traumatic day’’ and rather than make up allegations they were ‘‘telling the truth as they saw it.’’
Meanwhile the prospect of shooting on Bloody Sunday was discussed in advance by the army, it was revealed during evidence by a fellow former Insight team member, Philip Jacobson.
The detail was contained in a document recovered from the archive of the Insight team and purporting to be a briefing from a military source who attended an army Brigade meeting in advance of the civil rights march.
The newspaper document said a source at the meeting gave them the assessment that; ‘‘The mood of the meeting was one of complete determination that this really big arrest operation should go through.
‘‘The risk of firing was discussed and quite clearly accepted. Even if it meant shooting, everyone wanted to show that 8th Brigade knew how to go after the hooligans.’’
The document being among a mass of papers handed over to the Inquiry by the Sunday Times, but Mr Jacobson said he did not know how the newspaper obtained it.
Earlier he told the inquiry army headquarters in Northern Ireland HQNI were defensive in their handling of the media following Bloody Sunday.
Mr Jacobson, co-author with Peter Pringle of the book on Bloody Sunday - ‘‘Those are real bullets aren’t they?’’ - said: ‘‘Media inquiries were dealt with very badly in the immediate aftermath, and while HQNI later tried to make up for this, they remained defensive throughout.’’
