Reporter who taped gunshots did not believe live rounds were fired

A radio reporter who taped the sound of gunfire on Bloody Sunday said yesterday that he did not believe at the time that the …

A radio reporter who taped the sound of gunfire on Bloody Sunday said yesterday that he did not believe at the time that the soldiers were firing live rounds.

Mr David Capper, who was a reporter for BBC Northern Ireland, said he watched three or four armoured personnel carriers drive up Rossville Street and pull up some 50 to 60 yards away directly in front of him.

"As soon as they came to a halt, soldiers got out . . . and immediately began firing," he said in his statement to the inquiry. "The soldiers were definitely not coming under any fire as far as I could see and they were standing up straight and making no effort to take cover."

In cross-examination, he told Mr Christopher Clarke, counsel to the tribunal, that he had assumed at the time that the troops were firing gas grenades from their rifles. "I could conceive of no reason why they [should be] firing live rounds, so I didn't think they were."

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Mr Capper said that in the William Street area, before the troops moved into the Bogside, he heard a shot fired near him. He saw a man in a brown overcoat place a pistol in his coat pocket, and he believed this man had just fired towards some soldiers who were in a derelict building across the street.

He told Mr Arthur Harvey, for next-of-kin of a number of the victims, that he had not described this person at the Widg ery Inquiry.

At that time "it was diplomatic not to say you had identified [someone] because you would have been in the position then of maybe attending identification parades, and in the light of subsequent events the firing of that one shot became pretty irrelevant".

Mr Capper's tape, made on the day, was played to the inquiry. It included a large number of gunshot sounds, and at one point a voice, identified by Mr Capper as that of a passing paratrooper, can be heard remarking: "It's all f . . . ing go, innit."

Another witness, Mr William McCloskey, described how he "had a go" at a paratrooper on waste ground behind Rossville Flats. He hit the soldier in the lower body with his left foot and then turned and ran. He heard a shot fired behind him and a bullet hit the masonry on a nearby house.

He was arrested later and taken to Fort George army camp, where he and others were marched into a cage constructed of barbed wire and steel inside a large building like an aircraft hangar.

Soldiers with barking Alsatian dogs were all around as they went in, and he heard a Scottish paratrooper say to one of the dogs: "Don't be fretting now, boy. There's plenty of fresh meat for you. We shot nine of these bastards today."

The inquiry continues on Monday.