An article prepared for the Sunday Times in the week following Bloody Sunday concluded that the British army had intended to induce the IRA to come out and fight.
It claimed an army snatch squad would then either kill the IRA members or take them in, the inquiry heard yesterday.
Mr Peter Pringle confirmed that he was a member of the newapaper's investigative team which worked on the report, and he recalled that the newspaper decided not to publish the article because the Widgery inquiry had been announced during the week.
Mr Pringle said that some of his colleagues were upset with the decision by the paper's then editor-in-chief, Mr Harold Evans, to "spike" the article, but he understood the reasons for the decision.
Once the Widgery inquiry had been announced, the matter was sub judice, he said. Moreover, Mr Evans had ordered a major investigation into Bloody Sunday to run parallel to the Widgery inquiry, and he (the witness) was going to continue working on that.
The unpublished article had said the army thinking was that they would attack something - in this case, the Civil Rights march - which the IRA would have to defend or lose its popular support on Derry's Bogside, "and either way the IRA would be finished".
The article also asserted that for some weeks the Parachute Regiment had been drilling and rehearsing a company-size snatch squad - "at about 100 men, the biggest one ever used in the present Ulster fighting".
"We have no choice \ to conclude that this was a Parachute Regiment special operation which went disastrously wrong," the original article said.
However, Mr Pringle, who is now a freelance journalist based in New York, said in the course of his evidence: "The amount of information that we had been able to accumulate during that first week, though it was considerable, was not enough to conclude exactly what had happened on that day".
Mr Christopher Clarke QC, for the tribunal, said this fitted in with a statement made to this inquiry by Mr Bruce Page, who was then news features editor of the Sunday Times.
Mr Page, who has not yet given evidence, says in his statement: "I, along with some other members of the editorial Insight team, felt that the article was not substantiated by the evidence \ Sayle and \ Humphrey had produced and that it did not stand up to close scrutiny. It made far too many assumptions and could not have been published as a responsible piece of journalism".
Mr Pringle said that he was not in London at the time and had not taken part in any discussion as to whether the article should be published.
The witness described how the Sunday Times team asked members of both wings of the IRA what their involvement on Bloody Sunday had been. They said they had not been involved and had issued orders to their members not to fire any shots. "However we concluded that several shots had been fired by the IRA after the main firing by the Army," he said.
The Insight team had also collected a large number of eyewitness statements. They had attempted to check whether there had been IRA casualties, and he had become convinced that no IRA men had been killed: "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," he said.
A 12,000-word article was eventually compiled by the team and the finished product was published in the newspaper on April 23rd, 1972, shortly after the Widgery inquiry had issued its report.
Mr Pringle, who will continue his evidence today, was not asked yesterday about comments he made in an article in the Observer newspaper last Sunday, in which he was sharply critical of the Sunday Times for releasing to the inquiry the journalists' notebooks and confidential memos without any consultation with them.
"Without a fight and without conditions, \ Murdoch's editors handed over to Saville our archive of personal notebooks, confidential interviews and memos," he wrote. "The surrender of this material showed a shameful disregard for the sanctity of agreements between reporters and their sources.
"Witnesses who took us into their confidence, sometimes risking their personal safety, now feel angry and betrayed."