BLOODY SUNDAY INQUIRY: The British Home Office has sought exceptional restrictions on the hearing of evidence by serving MI5 officers and by the former agent, David Shayler, who still faces charges in Britain under the Official Secrets Act for his alleged "whistle-blowing" revelations about MI5's covert activities.
Families of the Bloody Sunday victims expressed shock and anger yesterday at the latest MI5 application to exclude them, their lawyers, the public and the media from the hearing of Secret Service agents' evidence - and for an unprecedented "delay" procedure which would allow MI5 an hour to censor transcripts of this evidence before it is made public.
The relatives claimed the proposed measures would create "a secret court within a public inquiry" and would deeply erode public confidence in the thoroughness and fairness of the process.
Mr John Kelly, chairman of the Bloody Sunday Trust, warned that the move was a further attempt to "wear the families down" to the point where they would walk away from the inquiry. Mr Kelly and other family members declared that they were determined to attend the inquiry to the end and would fight the proposed restrictions "tooth and nail".
Legal sources pointed out that the swingeing secrecy measures sought by the British intelligence establishment through the submission of Public Interest Immunity (PII) applications could force the tribunal to a fundamental reassessment of its ability to carry out the task entrusted to it by the British Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair, and the Westminster Parliament.
When a similar issue arose a year ago over secret British intelligence material, the chairman, Lord Saville, raised the prospect that he and his two fellow judges might be forced to consider that they could not carry out their mandate and conduct an effective inquiry unless the classified material was made public.
The new PII application by MI5 will be heard by the inquiry next Monday, and will be strenuously opposed by lawyers for the victims' families.
Counsel representing British soldiers who were on duty in Derry on January 30th, 1972, are also understood to be deeply unhappy at the prospect that they may not be able to question MI5 witnesses, as the application seeks to have them too excluded from the chamber.
Details of the PII application, backed up by a certificate signed by the Home Office junior minister, Mr John Denham MP, were circulated yesterday to lawyers for all parties at the inquiry.
Mr Denham's certificate includes a bizarre, Catch 22-style assertion: "It is not possible for me to be more specific in this Certificate about the information for which PII is claimed, or the precise harm that its disclosure would cause, since my doing so would be liable to cause the very damage that the certificate seeks to avoid."
For this reason, he states, an additional "sensitive" schedule which is a "highly classified document" is being provided only to the three judges and the inquiry's own counsel and solicitor.
The MI5 application - at least that section of it which is "open" - asks the inquiry to take the evidence of David Shayler and two agents known only as Officer A and Officer B under a "time-delay procedure" which is aimed, it says, at preventing any material becoming public which might lead to the identification, "whether accurate or not", of an agent codenamed Infliction or of his whereabouts.
It asserts that a grave risk to his life will arise if he is identified, or to the life "of any person who is wrongly identified as Infliction". It warns that there is a significant risk that during questioning of Occers A and B or Mr Shayler, "evidence might be given (whether inadvertently or maliciously) which might assist others to identifiy, or wrongly identify, Infliction . . . "
Infliction has earlier been described at the inquiry as a former MI5 agent in the Provisional IRA during the 1980s who has been resettled outside the UK under a new identity.
MI5 archive material concerning his "debriefing" in Amsterdam by Officer A appears to allege that he was told by Mr Martin McGuinness of Sinn Féin that he (Mr McGuinness) fired a shot which might have precipitated the intense firing in which paratroopers killed 14 civilians.
Mr McGuinness has strenuously denied the allegation as "a blatant lie".
Mr Shayler has said that, during his time in MI5, other agents told him informally that the source, or informer, known as Infliction was "a bullshitter".
MI5 now wants the tribunal to accept that, for the hearing of evidence by Officers A and B and Mr Shayler, lawyers for the "interested parties" (the victims' families and the soldiers) should give a list of prepared questions to the inquiry's counsel, Mr Clarke.