The Bloody Sunday Inquiry/Day 333: A former British army paratrooper said yesterday he shot two of three civilian gunmen at whom he fired at on Bloody Sunday.
The retired soldier, who was a sergeant in the First Battalion of the Parachute Regiment, whose members shot dead 13 civilians in the Bogside area of Derry during an illegal civil rights march on January 30th, 1972, said that when his regiment was deployed into the area, they came under sustained gunfire, which included up to 120 incoming shots.
The witness, known as Sergeant O, told the inquiry into the killings that the three gunmen he fired at in the vicinity of the Rossville Street flats complex had fired a total of 10 shots at him. In response he returned eight shots, hitting one gunman twice in the chest and another in either the head or shoulder.
"I think that it is probably true that the IRA had kept their hard men out of the area, up in the Creggan Estate, and I believe that dicks or second-rate men got hold of low-quality weapons which were in the Rossville Flats ready for use and disobeyed the IRA and opened fire on us," he said.
"If experienced IRA snipers had been firing the weapons, there is no doubt that the paras would have lost a number of men. If any of us had been killed, my guess is that there would have been no inquiry in 1972 or now."
Sergeant O said the first gunman he fired at was armed with a pistol and crouched behind a car. He said the gunman fired six shots at him from a range of 50 yards. He returned fire with one shot but missed. "I immediately fired two more rounds at the man and hit him in the centre of the chest and he went down. "