The BBC reporter who interviewed the British army commander, Gen Robert Ford, on a Derry street shortly after the Bloody Sunday killings concluded the general was being "economical with the truth". John Bierman told the inquiry he thought what the general was saying in answer to his questions was ludicrous. "I suppose it is conceivable that he was not being informed, but it is hard to believe that he did not know what had been going on," said Mr Bierman.
Gen Ford, who was Commander of Land Forces, Northern Ireland, had said the British army had only fired a few rounds and soldiers had been fired on first. "I told him I thought this was strange, as I had seen three or four bodies of people who had been shot," said the witness.
Mr Bierman, whose camera crew captured the images of Father Edward Daly and others carrying a badly wounded youth out of the Bogside, said when he saw this scene, "I thought to myself, what is going on." "I wondered why people were being shot and realised this was a big story that was happening," he said.
Replying to Mr Arthur Harvey QC, for a number of families of victims, Mr Bierman said he was astonished when he learned some 14 people had been shot dead and some 13 seriously injured. He added: "These are British citizens being killed on the streets of a British city, the sort of thing one has grown to expect perhaps in farflung colonial places, but not in the United Kingdom . . . yes, I was totally amazed."
Mr Bierman said he was in charge of one of two BBC news crews assigned to cover the civil rights march in Derry on January 30th, 1972. It had been decided that his crew would film the march from inside the Bogside while the second crew would film from the point of view of the security forces.
On the morning of the march he got his cameraman, Cyril Cave, a local, to show him around the Bogside because he was not familiar with the layout of the area. In William Street they met an army officer whom Mr Cave knew as the press officer of one of the local army units. When told they were in the Bogside to cover the demonstration, the officer said words to the effect of: "If I were you, I wouldn't be there at all."
Mr Bierman described how, after the march had reached William Street later in the day, an angry crowd asked him to bring his crew to a flat to film two men who, they said, had been wounded by British army gunfire. However, before they could enter the flat, another section of the crowd started to attack them. "Two men then appeared . . . They both gave the impression of being people in authority, and I assumed them both to be IRA officers," said the witness.
"One of the men said to me `Fuck off out of here with your crew before you get hurt'. We decided to make ourselves scarce and the crowd moved away to let us leave."
Mr Bierman described how he and his crew filmed subsequent events during the shooting in the Bogside. He said from his time spent on national service in the Royal Marines, he had been taught to identify where shooting was coming from. His impression was all of the shots he heard in the Bogside were coming from the army side.
Replying to Mr Edwin Glasgow QC, counsel for a large number of military personnel, the witness said the officer who had spoken to him and Mr Cave on the morning of Bloody Sunday had not given them the impression he was trying to discourage the press from filming what would happen in the Bogside. "I got the sense he was giving us a friendly warning that it was going to be pretty hot on that side," said Mr Bierman.