A former British soldier who was a private in the Parachute Regiment during the Bloody Sunday killings in Derry on January 30th, 1972, said yesterday that one of his former officers illegally fired his rifle on the day.
Soldier 019 told the inquiry into the killings by paratroopers of civilians that his superior officer, known as Lieut N, fired his SLR rifle two or three times over the heads of a crowd soon after he was deployed into the Bogside area of the city during an illegal civil rights parade.
Soldier 019 told the inquiry he was with Lieut N in an armoured personnel carrier when they were ordered into the Bogside. When they dismounted from the carrier, Lieut N ordered the witness to accompany him. When they de-bussed, Soldier 019 said, he saw a crowd of civilians, but they did not give him any cause for concern.
The witness, who was armed with a baton gun, said he then heard the noise of rifle fire, but he did not know if the shots had been fired by paratroopers or by civilian gunmen.
"I was standing with my back to the Rossville Flats and looking up Harvey Street", he said.
"Lieut N then fired two or three shots from his SLR. I was not looking at him as he fired and I heard rather than saw the shots fired. I was looking at the crowd.
"I saw two strikes where bullets hit the walls over the heads of the crowd.
"I realised more or less straightaway what Lieut N was doing. I thought he was firing warning shots, rather than at a target, because they hit the wall above the heads of the crowd.
"If he had been firing at a target he could not have missed from that range. It was not common for a soldier to fire warning shots and it was not covered by the Yellow Card, but I think his idea was to disperse the crowd," he told the inquiry's three judges.
Col Edward Loden, who commanded Support Company whose members carried out the Bloody Sunday killings, told the inquiry on the second day of his evidence that, although he saw his men firing at a rubble barricade, he did not see the shootings of any of the six unarmed men shot dead in the immediate vicinity of the barricade.