The Bloody Sunday Inquiry/Day 327: A former member of the British army's top secret Force Research Unit claimed yesterday that security services' intelligence documents stated that the soldiers involved in the Bloody Sunday killings in Derry in January 1972 had "over-reacted".
Martin Ingram (not his real name) also told the inquiry that the documents stated there was "no hostile fire" directed at the British army in the Bogside when 13 civilians were shot dead and 13 others wounded by paratroopers.
Mr Ingram's reputation is such within the British Intelligence Service that the Defence Secretary, Mr Geoff Hoon, in a letter to the inquiry, described him as "an especially attractive target" for republican terrorists who would still be keen to "seize, interrogate, torture and murder" him.
The witness told the inquiry that agents who were present in the Bogside on the day also assisted in ferrying casualties to hospitals across the Border into Co Donegal, where other agents lived.
Mr Ingram said during his tour of duty in Northern Ireland from 1981 to 1984, he had unrestricted access to all of the intelligence documents relating to Bloody Sunday.
He rejected a claim by an MI5 agent codenamed Infliction that Sinn Féin's Mr Martin McGuinness fired the first shot on Bloody Sunday, and said that Mr McGuinness was "targeted" by and under the constant surveillance of informers and agents immediately before, during and after the Bogside killings.
"During this tour I read many intelligence documents and I cannot recall any which suggested that Martin McGuinness was involved in the firing of a weapon on Bloody Sunday.
"At FRU (Force Research Unit) I saw documents relating to Martin McGuinness's activities on the day, both before and after the march. They related to what he was doing and who he was with.
"I saw none that suggested that he had a machine-gun in his hand or fired a shot.
"I think that they were surveillance reports, not source reports.
"McGuinness was being targeted. If you have a surveillance unit deployed as they were, then it would make sense for McGuinness to be a prime target."
He said Mr McGuinness was "probably one of the two most prominent people in Northern Ireland".
He added that if an intelligence document existed claiming that Mr McGuinness had fired on Bloody Sunday "I would have expected to have seen that and it would have been a topic of conversation certainly within the intelligence community".
Asked by Mr Alan Boxburgh, counsel to the inquiry, what overview of Bloody Sunday he had derived from reading all of the documents, he said: "That there had been no hostile fire and that the army had over-reacted and that there had been a large amount of casualties, some of which had been taken to hospitals across the Border, and people had been involved in ferrying people backwards and forwards, including agents."
Mr Ingram said the "agents" were "present on the day and became involved in it; they were entangled in it".
He also said he had attended Bloody Sunday commemoration marches.
Cross-examined by Mr Edwin Glasgow QC, who represents most of the Bloody Sunday soldiers, Mr Ingram said his claim that agents were involved in the cross-Border transportation of casualties was historically true, but he accepted that his assertion that there had been no hostile fire had been "put a little higher" than he meant.
Mr Ingram also said he believed there were two informers within the Provisional IRA in Derry during his three-year term in Northern Ireland, and that there were between 14 to 20 civilians who were security forces' informants on the Bloody Sunday march.
The inquiry resumes today.