A journalist was warned today she could be summoned back to the Bloody Sunday tribunal and required to name an Official IRA sniper who opened fire on troops and who was himself shot and wounded by a soldier.
Ms Mary Holland was given the warning by Lord Saville, chairman of the tribunal investigating the shooting of 13 civilians by paratroopers on January 30 1972, after she repeatedly refused to identify the wounded gunman she interviewed for the Observerin the aftermath of Bloody Sunday.
Ms Holland, told day 200 of the inquiry she had interviewed the gunman on a number of occasions while he lay in bed in a house in the republican Bogside recovering from a leg wound during the week after Bloody Sunday.
In her written statement to the inquiry Ms Holland said she could not remember the name of the sniper but even if she did would not betray his confidence.
But when she took the stand today at the inquiry sitting in Londonderry's Guildhall, she said that was incorrect - she knew his name but was not prepared to reveal it.
The gunman fired on a soldier but missed and was then hit himself. It had been "an opportunist shooting" and not part of any planned attack on the army, she said.
But Lord Saville told Ms Holland at the present time he would not require her to identify her source.
Meanwhile a Derry businessman denied that traders in the city urged the army's second-in-command in Northern Ireland to introduce a "shooting on sight" policy three weeks before Bloody Sunday.
The claim was made in a confidential memo from Major General Robert Ford , Commander Land Forces in Northern Ireland in 1972, to the army's General Officer Commanding and which was revealed to the second day of the inquiry in March 2000.
However Mr Robert Ferris, secretary of the Strand Road Traders' Association in 1972, flatly denied making the suggestion at a meeting with General Ford.
PA