BLOODY SUNDAY INQUIRY/Day 273: The personal assistant to the British army's most senior officer in Derry 30 years ago, yesterday denied destroying his notes of Bloody Sunday because he had witnessed a massacre.
The soldier, a sergeant identified only as INQ 1832, kept the notes for 27 years before destroying them as he prepared to give evidence to the Bloody Sunday inquiry.
In January 1972, he was personal assistant to Gen Sir Robert Ford, who was in charge of the army's day-to-day operations, he told the inquiry sitting in London.
Soon after British paratroopers shot dead 13 unarmed men on the Derry civil rights march in January 1972, Sergeant INQ 1832 left for a posting in Germany.
He had accompanied Gen Ford on the ground on Bloody Sunday and wrote up the general's diary of his movements that day.
Sergeant INQ 1832 took his own handwritten notes, a typed diary created from these, plus pages from a notebook about what happened, to Germany.
In his inquiry statement, Sergeant INQ 1832 said: "Even at that stage, I had a sixth sense that the events that day might come back to haunt me (although I was thinking in terms of months not 27 years)".
In the summer of 1972, the sergeant made notes from these documents and destroyed the originals.
On being contacted in September 1998 about his evidence to the inquiry, the sergeant retrieved the notes from his attic, typed up a fuller statement from them and threw the older notes away.
Mr Michael Mansfield QC, representing some of the families of the bereaved and wounded, told him: "You had seen something terrible that day which you knew would come back to haunt you."
Sergeant INQ 1832 said he destroyed the notes on which his statement was based only because it meant he had duplicate documents. - (PA)