Day 425: A former member of the Provisional IRA yesterday told the Bloody Sunday Inquiry that he and two other IRA volunteers carried out a scouting mission to determine both the strength and locations of the British soldiers who were deployed in Derry on Bloody Sunday.
Known as Provisional IRA 26, the witness told the inquiry that the scouting mission was carried out several hours before a civil rights march took place in the Bogside area of the city on January 30th, 1972. During the march, paratroopers opened fire, killing 13 civilians and wounding 13 others, none of whom was armed.
The witness said that all three members of the Provisional IRA scouting party were unarmed.
"We had been instructed I think to go and see where the soldiers had built their barricades, but I cannot recall any specific individual giving that order. Nor do I recall any particular purpose for doing so, such as to plan for any particular action. It was just a scouting mission. We had no operational orders which needed a scouting mission. I assume it was just an information-gathering operation", he said.
The witness said that he and his two IRA colleagues travelled from a house in the Creggan estate on a VW flat-bed truck into the William Street area of the Bogside where most of the paratroopers were subsequently stationed. After the mission was over, they returned to a house in Creggan "saying what we saw".
Asked by counsel to the inquiry, Ms Cathryn McGahey, if he was "involved in passing on to anybody the information you had about the troops' positions", the witness replied that he "might have been, I might have spoken to people about it, where I seen and where they were down there, but I cannot remember particularly speaking to anybody in charge or anything like that".
Cross-examined by barrister Mr Edwin Glasgow, QC for most of the Bloody Sunday paratroopers, the witness said that although his group had studied the positions of army barriers which had been erected around the periphery of the Bogside before the civil rights march, no Provisional IRA operation was planned in relation to the soldiers. "They were not, the soldiers that I seen, they were not hiding, they were not undercover or anything, they were standing out. They would have been an easy target if you want," the witness said.
He added that he went on the scouting mission even though the orders for that day were that Provisional IRA members had been ordered not to engage in activity against the soldiers.
He told the inquiry that later in the day he took part in the civil rights march. When the shooting started he was with two other members of the Provisional IRA, none of whom was armed, beside a rubble barricade in Rossville Street beside which four of the 13 victims were shot dead.
The witness said that he saw one soldier in particular in a standing position, firing two or three shots. He said that he originally thought that the soldier was firing blank rounds.
"As we watched a man came running past us from behind towards the soldiers.
"He was shouting something like 'you bastards' and he had a stone in his hand. I am positive it was a stone and not anything else," he said.
"As he threw it I recall the soldier who was standing with his rifle at his shoulder swung round in an arc and started shooting towards where we were.
"At about the same moment I heard the man, who I now know as Hugh Gilmore, called out 'I'm hit, I'm hit'."
The inquiry continues.