A police inspector today told the Bloody Sunday tribunal that he did not see civilians being mistreated while being detained at Fort George Military Camp.
Mr Alexander Gray, who was a duty sergeant at the time and worked in the military base on the day of the civil rights march, gave evidence from behind a screen.
A number of civilians arrested by army snatch squads during the march have given evidence claiming they were forced to hold on to barbed wire in the enclosures and forced to run a gauntlet of Paras, who beat them with batons as they emerged from military vehicles.
Fort George was used as a temporary holding centre on January 30th, 1972, the day that 14 civilians were shot dead by soldiers from the Parachute Regiment in Derry.
In his statement, he told the inquiry that processing of detainees took long into the evening with the last of them being released on police bail early on January 31st. "I terminated duty at approximately 1.30 a.m. I did not witness any ill-treatment of the persons detained by police or soldiers".
But Mr Gerard Elias QC, counsel for a number of military witnesses, said that one soldier he was acting for had reported prisoners being spreadeagled against a wall. The soldier had claimed that if the prisoners did not move quickly enough they were struck with batons.
But Mr Gray insisted they were not assaulted. "They [the prisoners] were squealing and yelling but not because they were being assaulted but because they did not know where they were going," he said.
PA