QC claim over use of Paras

A Bloody Sunday anniversary march in Londonderry

A lawyer at the Bloody Sunday inquiry has claimed that the use of the Parachute Regiment, a move recommended by General Robert Ford, was the factor which resulted in the events in Londonderry in 1972.

Arthur Harvey QC represents many of the families of the victims.

The inquiry was ordered by Prime Minister Tony Blair to investigate the circumstances surrounding the shooting dead of 13 civilians participating in a civil rights march on 30 January, 1972.

A fourteenth person died later from his wounds. Mr Harvey also rejected suggestions that the casualties were the tragic consequences of poor marksmanship.

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He said: "The 27 persons who were killed or injured were deliberately selected targets and deliberately selected by individuals who not only knew how to use weapons, but actually had the personal capacity to use them and use them accurately."

Concluding an opening submission on behalf of most of those bereaved and injured in the shootings, Mr Harvey told the hearings in Derry's Guildhall that a "framework of innocence" had been defiled that day.

It was, he said, "a shame" General Ford had not approached the civil rights demonstration in city's "no-go" Bogside district - the event which the Army was there to police - the same way as the Chief Superintendent Frank Lagan,

Chief Superintendent Lagan, the most senior RUC officer in the city, he said, had wanted it to go ahead unobstructed.

General Ford had spoken at the first tribunal into the catastrophe in 1972 of the soldiers' dilemma between enforcing the law or "taking the easy way out".

'Dilemma'

Mr Harvey said: "The soldiers' dilemma was the soldiers' dilemma created by General Ford.

"That dilemma ended up in the shooting of 27 unarmed and innocent individuals.

"It is a shame that General Ford did not have the capacity for reflection Chief Supt Lagan had.

"It is a shame General Ford did not have the knowledge of the local people of Derry that Chief Supt Lagan had. It is easy for a soldier to make a decision - the price has been paid by the people of this community."

Mr Harvey also appeared to rule out the possibility that the killings had been planned and said: "The case is that it is highly unlikely that the Army would have set out on such a day with a deliberate policy of inflicting death or injury by the use of firearms because of the presence of commercial television and the presence of professional reporters.

Mr Harvey spoke of Prime Minister Tony Blair's comments when establishing the inquiry in 1998 that it was in everybody's interests that the truth be established and told.

He said: "The truth always provides the basis upon which that which is bad can be remedied and that which it good can be made better.

"Denial of the truth always makes bad worse and always denies the opportunity of good to improve.

"So far as all of the families that I represent, they also see that there must be a further shore on the far side of the revenge.

"They simply seek the justice that has been denied them, the justice that was compounded in the Widgery Tribunal."