Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
October 17, 2002
LONDON -- Elite British troops killed 13 Catholic civilians without justification and committed "unspeakable acts" on Bloody Sunday 30 years ago, a veteran of the Northern Ireland massacre testified Wednesday.
Testimony by the former paratrooper, who is identified only as Soldier 027 and has his face concealed by a screen, was expected to take up to four days.
The former soldier, once a member of the elite Parachute Regiment, has lived for the past three years in a British witness-protection program because of fears that former regimental comrades could attack him.
The Bloody Sunday Inquiry is trying to establish what happened in Londonderry on Jan. 30, 1972, when paratroopers opened fire on Catholic demonstrators.
Bloody Sunday was a watershed event in the history of Northern Ireland, radicalizing many Catholics to support the IRA, which killed about 1,800 people before calling a 1997 cease-fire. The British army killed about 350 people in the conflict, none since 1992.
"Unspeakable acts took place on Bloody Sunday," he said. "There was no justification for a single shot I saw fired. The only threat was a large assembly of people, and we were all experienced soldiers who had been through riot situations before."
Britain appointed the three-judge panel from England, Australia and Canada in 1998. Its conclusions are due to be published in 2004.
Other soldiers -- scores of whom are scheduled to testify during the tribunal's London session in coming weeks -- insist they fired in response to gunfire from the Irish Republican Army and were aiming at gunmen within the crowd. A 1972 tribunal ruled largely in the soldiers' favor.
But Soldier 027 said his battalion, 1 Para, had become brutal and frustrated from months of duty in Belfast in late 1971, the year that the IRA began sniping at British soldiers and bombing their bases.
"There was nothing 1 Para wanted more than for the IRA to come out into the open and take us on," he testified.
The night before his unit was deployed to Londonderry to police a Catholic protest march, he said, a commander briefed soldiers that it was "likely that there would be shooting incidents the following day which would result in us getting kills."
In early 1972, the Catholic west side of Londonderry was an uncontested IRA power base, with roads blocked to prevent access by police and the local army garrison. Soldier 027 said the paratroopers were told to expect IRA gunfire when they crossed a barricade to arrest protesters.
Once across the barrier, Soldier 027 said, two paratroopers began firing directly into the crowd, other soldiers joined in, and "there was no command to prevent or stop this happening."
One soldier "indicated to me that he thought what was happening was great. He was exuberant," he said.
"I looked through my sights, scanning across the crowd. I was as keen to find a target as anyone, but I just could not identify a target that appeared to justify engaging. I did not see anyone with a weapon or see or hear an explosive device.
"I have a clear memory of consciously thinking, 'What are they firing at?' "