A researcher who was involved in a Channel 4 documentary about Bloody Sunday said yesterday soldiers he had interviewed for the programme made threatening and abusive phone calls to him the night the documentary was broadcast in January 1992, writes George Jackson.
Mr Neil Lindsay Davies, who is now director of his own television production company, Dai Films, said that like the soldiers involved in Bloody Sunday, he too had been a member of the first battalion of the Parachute Regiment.
He said he left the regiment in 1969, three years before paratroopers shot dead 13 unarmed civilians and wounded 13 others during a civil rights march in the Bogside area of Derry on January 30th, 1972.
Mr Davies yesterday told the inquiry into the shootings that in 1988 he became involved in a television project about the British withdrawal from Aden, but when some of the soldiers involved in that project told him they had also been in Derry on Bloody Sunday, he began thinking about making a programme about the Derry killings.
Over the next two years he interviewed soldiers and former soldiers involved in Bloody Sunday and, in May 1991, he started the process of formally interviewing the soldiers with the guarantee that he would never disclose their identities.
"Many of the soldiers I interviewed had three main concerns about it becoming known publicly that they had spoken to me in connection with the programme.
"First, they were worried about the consequences from the Parachute Regiment. Second, they were concerned that they would be breaking the Official Secrets Act. And finally, they were worried about how other soldiers might react since much of the information I was given pointed to some soldiers having acted in an extremely inappropriate way on Bloody Sunday.
"Many of the soldiers I spoke to told me that they were extremely fearful of the repercussions if their identities became public," he told the inquiry.
"After the programme was broadcast, I received a number of anonymous telephone calls threatening violence against me. I concluded that they were likely to have been either from the soldiers I had interviewed, or alternatively soldiers who were unhappy with what others had told me and which had subsequently been included in parts of the programme.
"The film as broadcast was critical in a number of respects of the role of Parachute Regiment soldiers on the day in question," he added.
"I could understand why some soldiers might have been upset with the way the paratroopers had been portrayed in the programme. I think that they may have felt that I had misled them since I had always stressed to them that one of my aims was to try to get the soldiers' point of view across. Then, when they had seen the broadcast programme, they could well have been unhappy that it was critical of them," he told the inquiry's three judges.
Mr Davies said the soldiers who called him might have felt that he had let them down.
The inquiry resumes today.